The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) (3 page)

In the days that followed, Mr. Berger subsisted largely on newspapers and
magazines of an improving nature. He had almost convinced himself that what he
had seen on the tracks employed by the locomotives of the London and South
Western Railway was a psychological anomaly, some form of delayed reaction to
the grief he had experienced at his mother’s death. He noticed that he was the
object of peculiar looks, both poorly concealed and unashamedly open, as he
went about his business in the town, but that was to be expected. He did hope
that the town’s memory of the unproductive police search might fade eventually.
He had no desire to be elevated to the role of local eccentric.

But as time wore on, something odd happened. It is usually
in the manner of experiences such as Mr. Berger’s that, as distance grows from
the event in question, so too the memory of it becomes foggier. Mr. Berger
should, if the ordinary rules of behavior were being obeyed, have become ever
more certain of the psychologically troubling nature of his encounter with the
young woman reminiscent of Anna Karenina. But Mr. Berger found himself
believing with greater and greater conviction that the opposite was true. He
had seen the woman, and she was real, admittedly allowing for a certain
latitude in one’s definition of reality.

He began reading again, tentatively at first, but soon with
his previous immersion. He also returned to walking the path that wound down to
the railway line and sitting on his stile to watch the trains go by. Each
evening, with the approach of the train from Exeter to Plymouth, he would set
aside his book and watch the rougher trail to the south. It was darker now, and
the trail was harder to see, but Mr. Berger’s eyes were still keen, and through
habit he grew practiced at picking out the difference in the density of the
bushes.

But the trail remained undisturbed until February came, and
the woman returned.

It was a cold but bracing evening. There was no damp in the air, and Mr. Berger
enjoyed the sight of his breath pluming as he took his evening constitutional.
There was music in the Spotted Frog that evening: some form of folk revivalism,
for which Mr. Berger had a sneaking fondness. He intended to drop in for an
hour or two once he had watched the train go by. His vigil at the stile had
become something of a ritual, and although he told himself that it was no
longer connected to the business of the woman with the red bag, he secretly
knew that it was. He was haunted by the image of her.

He took his seat on the stile and lit his pipe. From
somewhere to the east, he heard the sound of the approaching train. He glanced
at his watch and saw that it was just after six. The train was early. This was
unheard of. If he had still been in the habit of writing letters to the
Telegraph
,
he might well have popped off a missive announcing this turnup for the books,
much in the manner of those twitchers who liked to let the populace know of the
appearance of the first cuckoo of spring.

He was already composing the letter in his head when he was
distracted by a commotion to his right. Someone was coming down the trail, and
in some hurry. Mr. Berger dropped from the stile and began walking in the
direction of the sounds. The sky was clear, and the moon was already silvering
the undergrowth, but even without the aid of its light Mr. Berger would have
been able to pick out the woman rushing to meet the train and the red bag that
hung from her arm.

Mr. Berger dropped his pipe but managed to retrieve it. It
was, after all, a good pipe.

While it would not be untrue to say that he had become
obsessed with the woman, he had no real expectation of ever seeing her again.
After all, people did not make a habit of throwing themselves under trains. It
was the kind of act that tended to be performed once or not at all. In the case
of the former, any possible repeat of the incident was likely to be ruled out
by the action of a heavy engine or, in the unlikely event of survival,
sufficient recall of the painfulness of the first attempt to render most
unwelcome any further repetition of it. Yet here, without a shadow of a doubt,
was the same young woman carrying the same red bag and making the same rush
toward self-destruction that Mr. Berger had previously witnessed.

It must be a ghost, thought Mr. Berger. There can be no
other explanation. This is the spirit of some poor woman who died some time ago—for
he saw that her clothing was not of this century—and she is doomed to repeat
her final moments over and over until—

Until what? Mr. Berger wasn’t certain. He had read his share
of M. R. James and W. W. Jacobs, of Oliver Onions and William Hope Hodgson, but
had never come across anything quite like this in their stories. He had a vague
notion that digging up a forgotten corpse and reburying it in a more
appropriate location sometimes helped, while James tended to favor restoring
ancient artifacts to their previous resting place, thereby calming the spirits
associated with them, but Mr. Berger had no idea where the young woman
might be interred, and he had not picked so much as a flower while on his
walks, let alone some old whistle or manuscript. All of this would have to be
dealt with later, he realized. There was more important business to attend to.

The early arrival of the train had obviously caught the
woman, spectral or otherwise, by surprise, and the branches seemed to be
conspiring to keep her from her date with mortality. They caught at her dress,
and at one point she took a tumble that sent her to her knees. Despite all of
these hindrances, it was obvious to Mr. Berger that she was still likely to
make it to the tracks in time to receive the full impact of the train.

Mr. Berger ran, and as he did so he screamed and shouted and
waved his arms. He ran faster than he had ever run before, so that he managed
to reach the base of the trail some time before the woman did. She drew up
short, seemingly surprised to see him. Perhaps she had been so intent on her
own demise that she had failed to hear his cries, but she was now faced with
the physical reality of Mr. Berger, and he with hers. She was younger than
he, and her skin was unusually pale, although that might just have been the
moonlight. Her hair was the blackest that Mr. Berger had ever seen. It seemed
to consume the light.

The woman tried to dart to her right and then to her left to
avoid Mr. Berger, but the bushes were too thick. He felt the ground vibrating,
and the noise of the approaching train was deafeningly loud. He was aware of
its whistle sounding. The driver had probably spotted him by the tracks. Mr.
Berger raised his right hand and waved to let the driver know that all was
okay. The woman was not going to get past him, and Mr. Berger had no intention
of throwing himself under any trains.

The woman clenched her fists in frustration as the train
rushed by. Mr. Berger turned his head to watch it go, some of the
passengers staring at him curiously from the window, and when he looked back
the woman was gone. It was only as the rattle of the train faded that he heard
the sound of bushes rustling and knew that she was making her way back up the
hill. He tried to follow, but the same branches that had previously hampered
her progress now delayed his. His jacket was torn, he lost his pipe, and he
even twisted his left ankle slightly on a root, but he did not give up. He
reached the road just in time to see the woman slip into a laneway that ran
parallel to Glossom’s high street. The back gardens of a row of cottages lay on
one side, and on the other the rear wall of what had once been the town’s brewery
but was now derelict and unused, although a faint smell of old hops still hung
about it.

Eventually the laneway diverged, with the path to the left
eventually connecting with the main street, while the path to the right twisted
into darkness. Mr. Berger could see no sign of the woman to his left, for the
high street was well lit. He chose instead to go right and was soon among the
relics of Glossom’s industrial past: old warehouses, some still in use but most
abandoned; a wall that announced the presence of a combined cooperage and
chandlery, while the decay of the building behind it left no doubt that it had
been some time since either barrels or candles had emerged from within; and,
finally, a two-story redbrick building with barred windows and grass growing by
its doorstep. Beyond it was a dead end. As he drew nearer, Mr. Berger could
have sworn that he heard a door softly closing.

Mr. Berger stood before the building and stared up at it.
There were no lights burning, and the windows were so encrusted with dirt and
filth both inside and out that there was no possibility of catching a glimpse
of its interior. A name was carved into the brickwork above the door. Mr.
Berger had to strain his eyes to read it, for the moonlight seemed to have no
desire to aid him here. At last he made out the words “Caxton Private Lending
Library & Book Depository.”

Mr. Berger frowned. He had made enquiries in the town as to
whether there was a library and had been told that there was none, the nearest,
as with so much else that Glossom lacked, being in Moreham. There was a
newsagent that sold books, but they were mainly detective stories and romances,
and there was a limit to how many of either Mr. Berger wished to read. It was,
of course, entirely likely that Caxton Private Lending Library & Book
Depository was no longer in business, but if that was the case, then why was
the grass growing around its doorstep trampled flat in places? Someone was
still entering and leaving it on a semiregular basis, including, if Mr. Berger
was not mistaken, a woman, or something phantasmagorical that resembled a
woman, with an Anna Karenina fixation.

He took out his matchbook and lit a match. There was a
yellowed sign behind a small pane of glass to the right of the door. It read
“For all enquiries, please ring bell.” Mr. Berger used up three matches looking
in vain for a bell of any kind. There was none. Neither was there a slot or box
for mail.

Mr. Berger worked his way round the corner of the building
to the right, for any progress to the left was barred by the wall. Here was a
smaller laneway, but it ended in another brick wall, and there were no windows
on that side of the building, nor was there a door. Behind the wall was a patch
of waste ground.

Mr. Berger returned to the front door. He banged on it once
with his fist, more in hope than expectation of an answer. He was unsurprised
when none came. He examined the single keyhole. It did not look rusted, and
when he put a finger to it, the digit came back moistened with a hint of lock oil.
It was all most peculiar and not a little sinister.

There was nothing else to be done for now, Mr. Berger
thought. The night was growing steadily colder, and he had not yet eaten.
Although Glossom was a quiet, safe town, he did not fancy spending a long night
outside a darkened lending library in the hope that a spectral woman might
emerge so he could ask her what she thought she was doing throwing herself
repeatedly under trains. There were also some nasty scratches on his hands that
could do with a spot of antiseptic.

So, with one final look back at Caxton Library, and more
perturbed than ever, Mr. Berger returned home, and the Spotted Frog was
deprived of his custom for that night.

Mr. Berger returned to Caxton Library shortly after 10:00 a.m. the next morning
on the basis that this was a reasonably civilized hour at which to appear, and
if the Caxton was still in business, then it was likely that someone might be
about at this time. The Caxton, though, remained as silent and forbidding as it
had the previous evening.

With nothing better to do, Mr. Berger began making
enquiries, but to no avail. General expressions of ignorance about the nature
of Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository were his sole reward at
the newsagent, the local grocery, and even among the early arrivals at the
Spotted Frog. Oh, people seemed to be aware that the Caxton existed, but nobody
was able to recall a time when it was actually in business as a lending
library, nor could anyone say who owned the building, or if any books still
remained inside. It was suggested that he might try the town hall in Moreham,
where the records for the smaller hamlets in the vicinity were kept.

So Mr. Berger got in his car and drove to Moreham. As he
drove, he considered that there seemed to be a remarkable lack of interest in
Caxton Library among the townsfolk of Glossom. It was not merely that those to
whom he spoke had forgotten about its existence until Mr. Berger brought it up,
at which point some faint atavistic memory of the building was uncovered before
promptly being buried again; that, at least, might be understandable if the
library had not been in business for many years. What was more curious was that
most people seemed to be entirely unaware of its existence and didn’t care very
much to investigate further once it was brought to their attention. Glossom was
a close-knit community, as Mr. Berger was only too well aware, for comments
about hallucinations and train delays still followed him as he asked about the
library. There appeared to be only two types of business in the town:
everybody’s business, and business that was not yet everybody’s but soon would
be once the local gossips had got to work on it. The older residents of the
town could provide chapter and verse on its history back to the sixteenth
century, and every building, old or recent, had its history.

All, that is, except Caxton Private Lending Library.

The town hall in Moreham proved to be a source of little
illumination on the matter. The library building was owned by the Caxton Trust,
with an address at a PO box in London. The Trust paid all bills relating to the
property, including rates and electricity, and that was as much as Mr. Berger
could find out about it. An enquiry at the library in Moreham was met with
blank looks, and although he spent hours searching back issues of the local
weekly paper, the
Moreham & Glossom Advertiser
, from the turn of the
century onward, he could find no reference to Caxton Library anywhere.

It was already dark when he returned to his cottage. He
cooked himself an omelet and tried to read, but he was distracted by the fact
of the library’s apparent simultaneous existence and nonexistence. It was
there. It occupied a space in Glossom. It was a considerable building. Why,
then, had its presence in a small community passed relatively unnoticed and
unremarked for so long?

The next day brought no more satisfaction. Calls to
booksellers and libraries, including to the grand old London Library and the
Cranston Library in Reigate, the oldest lending library in the country,
confirmed only a general ignorance of the Caxton. Finally, Mr. Berger found
himself talking to the British representative of the Special Libraries
Association, an organization of whose existence he had previously been unaware.
She promised to search their records but admitted that she had never heard of
the Caxton and would be surprised if anyone else had either, given that her own
knowledge of such matters was encyclopedic, a judgment that, after an hour-long
history of libraries in England, Mr. Berger was unwilling to doubt.

Mr. Berger did consider that he might be mistaken about the
woman’s ultimate destination. There were other buildings in that part of town
in which she could have hidden herself to escape his notice, but the Caxton was
still the most likely place in which she might have sought refuge. Where else,
he thought, would a woman intent upon repeatedly reenacting the final moments
of Anna Karenina choose to hide but an old library?

He made his decision before he went to bed that night. He
would become a detective of sorts and stake out Caxton Private Lending Library
& Book Depository for as long as it took for it to reveal its secrets to
him.