The Library - The Complete Series (29 page)

Book 7:

Shadows on the Page

Prologue

A distant rumble of thunder signals impending doom. Lost and alone in the rain-soaked aisles of the Library, I run through the mud, desperately hoping to find a way out. With only the light of the moon to guide my progress, I soon realize that I'm just going around and around, and eventually I start to think that I've come full circle. It's as if I'm never going to find my way to safety.

Hearing a rattling sound from above, I look up just in time to see a dark shape brush past the top of a nearby shelf. They're up there again, observing us from the heights. As rain pours down, I turn and see something moving along the aisle toward me. For a few seconds I'm frozen to the spot, before I realize that the creature is a huge tick. I turn and run, but I know there's nowhere for me to hide. This whole place is filled with nightmares, and as soon as I get away from one, I'll just run into another.

As I turn the next corner, I come face to face with a group of Grandapams. They're locked in battle, and to my shock I realize that they're eating one another's flesh. Pushing past them, I see the Citadel up ahead. Since the explosion, the place is in ruins, but it's the only place that might afford me a little sanctuary. Running along the muddy aisle, I eventually glance over my shoulder and see that there's nothing behind me. I pause for a moment, before hearing the familiar rattling sound above. Looking up, I see a huge dark shape leaning toward me. A flash of lightning lights the scene and I finally come face to face with the predator that has been stalking me. I'm helpless to react as the creature opens its jaws and then slams them shut around the upper half of my body.

Sitting up in bed, I stare at the dark wall opposite. My heart is racing and sweat is pouring down my face. I turn and look across the room, but all I see are the familiar shadows of my bedroom. It's the night before I head off to college, and I've had
another
dream about that strange, vast library. I swear to God, every night the dream gets more and more vivid, and I wake up feeling as if I'll never be free. In fact, the dream is always much more vivid than real life.

But it's just a dream.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

Just a dream. Just a dream. And at my age, in my early twenties, I'm way too old to be suffering from stupid recurring nightmares. Damn it, I just need to get a grip and focus on the positives. It's been six months since my scoliosis surgery, and I'm fully recovered. My back is totally healed, and I'm ready to go off to college and start my life over. I just wish I could shake these nightmares. Sometimes, it feels as if I'm being pulled back to a place I've long forgotten, almost as if all these creatures and places are real.

Claire

One year later

"So are you coming to the library?" asks Haley as we head down the steps. It's a bright, sunny day and the campus is buzzing with activity. Mid-terms finished last week, which means the pace has relaxed and all the tension has dissipated. It's good to get a chance to relax, even if it's only temporary. "Claire?" Haley adds after a moment. "Did you hear me?"

"What?" I ask, turning back to her. The truth is, I was kind of zoned out in my own little world. For a few weeks now, I've felt as if there's a kind of fog in my mind.

"The library," she says with a smile. "I was thinking of heading over to look for those books on Akkadian language. I mean, there's gonna be a rush and I don't wanna end up with the wrong editions." She stares at me for a moment, as if she's expecting me to say something. "Claire?"

"Yeah?" I say, still a little dazed.

"Are you sure you're okay?" she asks. "You've got this weird look in your eyes."

"Yeah, sure," I reply, glancing over at the large, imposing edifice of the campus library. "I'm fine. We should go get the books. I guess that's a good idea."

"Do you still feel a bit weird about this place?" she asks as we make our way across the grass. "Is that the problem?"

"The library? Why would I be weird about it?"

"Didn't your uncle die here?"

"Oh," I say, as we pass into the huge shadow cast by the building. "Yeah. That." She's right. A few years ago, my uncle was crushed to death by a set of sliding shelves in the library's basement. It was, by all accounts, a bizarre and unrepeatable accident that has never been satisfactorily explained. The investigation put it down to bad luck, but only after an exhaustive study had ruled out every other possible cause.

"What happened to him again?" she continues.

"It was an accident with some shelves," I tell her.

"So he was, like, squashed?"

"Yeah," I say. "Maybe we can talk about something else, though. It's kind of... not something I really enjoy thinking about."

"Sorry," she replies. "I thought maybe it'd help to talk about it, but if you don't want to come inside, I can go fetch the books and you can wait out here."

"It was years ago," I continue as we head through the main door and into the building. A large, airy place with big windows and high ceilings, the campus library is usually packed but this week, with mid-terms over, it's relatively empty. Piles of books are sitting on trolleys, waiting to be re-shelved by the constantly harried and underpaid staff, who seem to be constantly run off their feet.

"Actually," I say, stopping as we reach the door that leads to the Humanities section, "I think I want to go and take a look at something in History."

"History?"

"Yeah, just something that's been bugging me. I won't be long. I'll come and find you when I'm done." With that, I turn and hurry across the large open hallway before she has a chance to ask my any more questions. I like Haley, but she has a tendency to open her mouth at inappropriate times, and right now there's something I need to check. Coming to the end of my first year back at college after my operation, I feel as if I'm finally getting close to a breakthrough on a little side project I've been pursuing.

The History section is vast, filled with books on a huge range of subjects including some of the most obscure civilizations known to have ever existed. This college has one of the world's most highly regarded collections of documents and texts regarding ancient, pre-Mesopotamian cultures, but even these are too mainstream for my interests. The book I'm looking for is an old, mostly forgotten title that has been dismissed by most scholars as a hoax. Still, I'm determined to see if it contains what I'm looking for. I can't quite explain this strange impulse, but it's as if the fog in my mind occasionally lifts for a moment and compels me to keep digging into one particular legend.

Pausing for a moment, I spot a small door off to the side, with the name Thomas J. Sharpe stencilled in gold letters. For a moment, I consider going over to knock, before I realize that it's probably just a coincidence. Continuing to make my way to the far end of the section, I remind myself that my mind has been particularly fuzzy lately. I have all these half-remembered memories and thoughts that don't seem to fit together, and I'm determined to work out exactly what happened to me. About a year ago, I had the most intense and vivid dream I've ever experienced, but lately I've been wondering whether it was a dream at all. It felt so real, and I feel as if the fog in my mind started at around the same time. To be honest, I'm a little scared that maybe I'm sick.

Then again, since when do dreams turn out to be mentioned in history books?

The book I'm looking for is called 'The History of the Library'. Written hundreds of years ago by an obscure European ethnographer named Barclay Smotherwood, the book purports to tell the history of a vast library that exists in an entirely different land. Back in the eighteenth century, the book caused a brief stir before it was dismissed as simply a work of fiction. Smotherwood was eventually derided as a hack, and he died in penury. Ordinarily, I'd never give such a book a second thought, but there's something unusual about the details contained within its pages. For one thing, it seems to describe the world I encountered in my dream. For another, until a few weeks ago, I had no idea that it even existed. So how could I have dreamed about this huge library that apparently exists in a far-off land?

When I find the book, I'm not surprised to find that it's tattered and almost falling apart. It's a testament to the lack of respect that's accorded to Smotherwood's work that such an old volume is left to rot on a shelf at the back of the History section, rather than being properly looked after and preserved. Pulling the book from the shelf, I open the cover carefully and sure enough several pages immediately fall to the floor. As I reach down to grab them, I accidentally drop the book, and all the other pages come loose as it hits the ground. Sighing, I stare for a moment at the mass of paper all around my feet, and I realize I'm going to have to sort them back into order. Unfortunately, as I start gathering them up, I realize that there are no page numbers.

"Problem?" asks a voice nearby.

Looking up, I see the last person I wanted to bump into right now. David Caliko is renowned across the entire campus as the grumpiest, most argumentative archivist anyone could ever have the mis-pleasure of meeting. A middle-aged man with a tall, thin body and freakishly small eyes, he looks like he's never cracked a smile in his entire life.

"I dropped it," I say, looking down at the loose pages. "Pages were already falling out."

"It's not your fault," he says, sounding annoyed as he kneels down and starts gathering up the pages. "You can't be blamed for your ignorance. Your lecturers should teach you how to handle old texts. You don't just grab them and start manhandling them. There's a certain level of skill involved."

"Maybe if a book can't be opened without falling apart," I reply, kneeling down to help him, "it shouldn't be just sitting out on a shelf."

He stares at me for a moment. "You raise a valid point," he says eventually, before looking at the cover of the book in question. "I just never expected anyone to be interested in this old thing. I doubt anyone's touched it for ten, maybe fifteen years. Some people believe it to be quite radical, while others think it's not worth the paper that was used for its production. You know, Barclay Smotherwood's reputation was destroyed by the ideas he put down on paper."

"I know all about it," I reply, keen to avoid a long conversation on the subject. "I just wanted to see what he wrote about the library. I wanted to go through the original text."

"For an assignment?"

"Yeah," I say, lying. "For an assignment."

"Huh," he replies, staring at me as if he doesn't believe a word I'm saying. "You've certainly picked a rather obscure topic."

"I thought it might be interesting," I tell him.

"He really believed it all, you know," Caliko continues. "It's said that he once gave a lecture at the Royal Society in London, and he kept talking even after the entire audience had walked out. They hurled insults at him, they told him he was a fool, but he just kept on talking and eventually he finished his speech to an empty theater. He really believed that this library existed." He pauses for a moment. "It's hard not to admire a man who sticks to his principles, even if at the end of the day he does seem to have been something of a fool."

"How do you know he was a fool?" I ask.

"Have you
read
this stuff yet?" he replies, holding up a handful of pages. "He describes a whole world filled with the vast, outdoor shelves of a great library. He talks of citadels rising up in the clearings. He describes creatures and societies living between the shelves. At one point, he even claims that the library is one of seven worlds that exist alongside one another." He smiles. "I mean, his biggest mistake as far as I can see was that he presented all these ideas as fact. If he'd just repackaged the whole thing as some kind of new religion, he might have got it off the ground. Unfortunately, he decided to pretend it was all real."

"But maybe it
was
real," I say. I immediately feel dumb for voicing such an idea, but I can't get over the fact that a lot of Smotherwood's ideas are the same as the things that happened in my dream. The clincher, as far as I'm concerned, is that I'd never heard of Barclay Smotherwood or his library until after the dream, so how did these two separate things manage to collide in my mind? "I mean, maybe it was rooted in fact," I continue. "Maybe he took a few basic truths and then built some kind of fantasy over the top. People do that sometimes, right?"

"I want to call you a fool," Caliko says, "but I've been around long enough to know that occasionally it is fools who turn out to be telling the truth. Even if that truth seems, at first glance, to be absolutely insane." He finishes gathering up the pages. Once he's quickly tucked them between the covers of the book, he passes them to me and, to my surprise, he actually smiles. "You'll have to sort them into the right order yourself. Smotherwood apparently didn't believe in page numbers. He claimed they were a form of tyranny. Maybe he was right, but either way, it's going to make your life a hell of a lot harder."

Once he's gone, I'm left kneeling between the shelves, holding 'The History of the Library' in my hands. I want to dismiss the whole thing, of course, and to mark it down as a curious but insignificant idea that was briefly raised by a madman who lived hundreds of years ago. The problem, though, is that I can't shake the feeling that my dream was more than a dream. As time passes, I seem to be remembering more and more details, as if the dream's reality is slowly unfolding in my mind. There's a part of me that wants to go running to a doctor so I can get some help from a mental health professional, but there's another part of me that enjoys the idea that maybe, just maybe, that dream was more than a dream.

"Lunch?" asks a familiar voice suddenly.

Turning, I find that Haley has tracked me down.

"Sure," I say, getting to my feet.

"What the hell is
that
?" she asks, looking at the dismantled book in my hands.

"I'm checking it out," I say.

"It's falling apart."

"I guess, but I just..." I pause for a moment, as I realize that I can't possibly tell Haley what's been bothering me. "I'm just interested," I say eventually. "I mean, it's a pretty obscure book, so I'm going to be the first person who's read it for a long time. It just seems like a kind of cool thing to do. Anyway, I might get something more out of it. I still need to come up with something for my presentation."

"You're weird sometimes," Haley replies. "You know that, right? Come on, let's go get lunch."

Deciding not to bother fighting my corner, I follow her along the aisle and back toward the main door. I can't help but glance again at the door to Thomas J. Sharpe's office. I have no idea who Sharpe is, but the name definitely seems familiar, almost as if it's part of the same fog that surrounds my memories of the dream. Maybe I'm really losing my mind, and soon I'll be sitting in a padded cell and jabbering on about some bizarre library. Still, the book in my hands seems to suggest that there might at least be a little truth to the whole idea. As crazy and irrational as it might seem, I can't shake the idea that maybe, just maybe, Barclay Smotherwood was actually onto something all those years ago. Could there really be a huge library world out there somewhere?