The Infinite Library (39 page)

“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 debris, 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 communicate 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 door swings in,” I said, trying to put a face of calm into our plan of escape. “You are the stronger of the two of us, so I'm going to open the door, and you're going to charge out in the lead with me right behind you.”

I could see in his eyes that the plan was not appetizing to him, but there would be no choice – the apartment was too high up to make a daring jump to ground level. We steadied ourselves in our respective positions: I quietly clutched the doorknob while he leaned forward in a linebacker's stance. On the count of three...

One... The wall beside the door was being scratched with something, or it may have been the rattle of a spray paint can.

Two... Murmuring voices, some macabre laughter in the hall.

Three... I flung the door open and Angelo darted on cue, barreling into a blurry collection of strangers taken by surprise. I swung myself around the now open door and shouldered my way through, not pausing to record the faces or manner of dress of those performing the siege. We took the stairs down three and four at a time, careening into walls and madly scrambling our way out. I could hear footfalls not far behind. The front entrance seemed like the longest mile away, but we did make it. I felt the brushing of a hand that failed to gain grasping purchase upon my clothes, and we wriggled out into the street, breaking into a full sprint.

By the time we felt that we had put a safe distance between us and our pursuers, it must have been twelve blocks into the downtown area. We ducked nervously into an all-night cafe and nested ourselves in the back, keeping a clear view of the service exit in case we would need to bolt again. By this time, I knew it was appropriate to reveal my plan... or at least have the time to properly develop it. It was hard to recall, given that it had been formed momentarily under duress, and it seemed that my reasoning for going to Detroit have all but evacuated.

I stumbled over my words between catching my breath, my chest stabbing and hammering. “It's a vague idea, but it's all I have right now. I say we go to where Setzer was murdered and -” I stopped when Angelo shot me a wide-eyed glare that suggested that I was insane for even considering it. “Listen, I know this seems crazy, but we need to get to the source of the problem. I think that Setzer's predilection for manufacturing a profusion of texts may explain what we saw back at my apartment.”

“It was a fucking miracle we got out of there,” Angelo protested. “We could have suffered as Setzer did. And now you mean to tell me that our next plan of action is to go to the scene of the crime?”

“It would be the last place in the world they would look for us, whoever 'they' are.”

“What do you base that on?”

“Nothing deductive – purely intuition. We need to get the reins on all this mystery.”