The Library of Forgotten Books (16 page)

“No!” yells Bikrim. “It’s you who are mechanical men. You live your lives driven by your petty traditions, your sloth and your indulgence, your narrow-minded views. You do not make choices. Choices make you.”

They show no emotion but their words are angry: “We built you to do our bidding. We made you out of history and liquid metal. We took you and smashed you into a new shape. You are nothing without us.”

“I am,” says Bikrim, “I am something despite you and your hideous histories.”

“We’ll show you,” they say.

From a bloodied passageway behind the seated Others come more wasted beings. They sit in great metal exoskeletons, metal bones holding their limbs together, their emaciated rib-cages held in place with leather straps. They come to him, their movements awkward and mechanical.

They take him by the shoulders. Their metal hands are hard. Bikrim groans. One takes a strange-shaped implement, a metal thing with a handle, and presses it against his chest. Bikrim cries as a piece of his chest comes away, a hard piece of his chest. He looks down inside himself. He sees not flesh and blood, but wires and mechanical parts: cogs and pistons. Steam rises from inside him. He cries in fear.

One of the creatures presses something inside him, and his mind shifts. His name is Bikrim, but what does he do? Does he work? He remembers something, a giant metal bird, but that is all.

“You see what we can do?” say The Others.

“I am Bikrim,” he says. “I know who I am.”

“You’re a cog, a nothing. You’re just a tool.”

A minion pokes inside him again, and something goes blank.

“I am...I know who I am. I am...” But he can’t remember. Only glimpses of a vast Library filled with forgotten works.

They speak again: “You see—we control not just your body, but your mind—everything that constitutes you.”

The minion presses again.

He is no more. He is nothing. He is blank.

“You see,” the Others say. “You see.”

The one who is no-one, who is blank, who is nothing, looks at the little wasted creatures and says, “It is you, it is you who are the mechanical men!” He reaches inside himself and twists a knob. The Others disappear—they are gone, like smoke in the high cold winds. He is left alone in the room. Who am I? he wonders.

Who was this horror of a creature standing next to me, its face and body shifting and warping? My mind was blank, like a chest emptied of its contents. I staggered up and followed the thing through an elevator and along winding corridors filled with strange objects. I knew only the building equipment on the walls: drills and saws and jackhammers.

The thing led me to some stairs and into a vast and gloomy building. A woman approached me and called me by the strange name, “Al-iza.” I nodded to her and slipped away at the first opportunity out into a vast city. It was evening and I wandered to a lively part of the city, amongst jugglers and chess players, debaters and coffee merchants. In a daze, I trudged along narrow alleyways. I climbed stairs and crossed overhead walkways. There were snatches of conversation there in the background, but I barely registered them. All meaning had been stripped from the world. What was left was just a gutted empty thing, all form and no content.

Who am I? I thought.

My name is Bikrim.

When I looked down I saw Ister, standing there, his hair wild and windswept, his eyes ablaze as if some internal struggle was alight within him. He looked like nothing if not some wounded animal, facing its deadly pursuer.

As if struck, I staggered. I am Alisa, and the whole story came back to me, like a book re-read.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“Because I’m not what you want me to be, I’m not what I want to be.”

“None of us are,” I said, resigned. “But it saddens me that it is you who have become mechanical—taking your books weekly into the Library, letting things happen. You’re just a part of the machine too.”

“What would you have me do? What would you have me say?”

“Run away with me, to Caeli-Amur. Let’s leave this place.”

“Caeli-Amur is no different.”

“But it is,” I said. “Things are changing there.”

He fell onto his knees and there were tears in his eyes. “I know nothing except my books,” he said. “I know nothing of the world.”

I walked to him then and held his head against my chest, and he said, “What a strange force you are in my life.”

“Your books,” I said. “We must take them. You’re latent, even if you don’t believe it.”

“I’m not latent, I’m just a writer.”

I took him then back to my empty apartment, this writer with his wild hair and his wounded eyes and he slept, perhaps for the first time in a week, and I watched him, exhausted. To rescue his books from the library—that was the task.

I arranged to meet Amacus that night, and began the search for an entrance. On the upper level, I tried to open one of the stained glass windows. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again. I took a book and wrapped my jacket around it and my hand and prepared to break the glass.

“Well, well...” Mrs Emmago said calmly behind me. I was discovered.

“Mrs...” I stopped. There was nothing to say.

“So you need to get in. Or you want to get some books out. Well, well.” She looked at me calmly. “I wish I’d had the strength to do what you’re doing. I wish I’d had the strength to escape this place.” We stood there for a moment and then she said, “Follow me.”

I followed her to the upper level hall. She showed me the secret entrance, hidden behind a bookshelf, an entrance she’d known about for twenty years. The stairs led into the sewers and from there it was easy to reach the street: just a short walk to a ladder and up to a manhole. “I always hoped it would come in useful,” she said. “Oh, it’s so dramatic,” and she smiled softly. I had never seen her smile. “I suppose you could use this,” she touched her pendant. “There’s no point coming alone.”

“But Mrs Emmago, you’ll be punished.”

She looked at me, smiling. “I was in love once, you know. That Mr Ister is quite handsome, isn’t he?”

That night Ister and I entered the Library, our pendants hung safely around our necks. The roofs were hidden in darkness, and shadows played between the shelves. Even though we stepped as lightly as we could, the noise of our feet echoed through the cavernous halls.

And then they were around us, their bodies radiating an unnatural light, a green-grey sheen, and I looked down at the floor, but next to me Mr Ister groaned and fell to his knees. Their warbling voices came all together, a nightmarish chorus: “Look what we have here...” “Little lost ones.” “Oh you’re not supposed to be here.” “I know you.”

The Guardians moved like carnivores around their prey: circling around us and each other, all the time morphing in and out of our universe, melting and warping, their bodies twisting and turning in a nightmare dance. “He has a pendant too.” “Lucky for him.” “But doesn’t he look sweet? Doesn’t he look full of life?”

“Get up,” I said to Ister who was pale beside me, and on his knees. “Get up!”

Grabbing him by the arm, I pulled him along, between the towering shelves and in the direction of the stairs to the lower level.

“Such a pity.” “She’s determined that one.” “She’s something.”

By the time we had reached the stairs only one Guardian remained with us, its voice echoing: “Oh won’t you be in trouble? You, yes you, and Mr Ister also. Do you remember me, Ister? Remember me from the book clubs and the coffee houses?”

“Agee, is that you?”

The Guardian laughed horribly, his bulky form pressing close to us. “Oh if only I could drain your talent. Imagine the writer we would be then!”

“Your work was fine on its own.”

“Don’t lie to me,” spat Agee, his face suddenly close, a warped melted thing full of flaring nostrils and burning devil’s eyes, its cheeks bulbous and purple-veined.

Agee followed us down the staircase, muttering incomprehensible insults.

I noticed the booted feet planted at the base of the stairs only when they were close.

“Well, well...Thieves...oh no, Mr Ister...not you,” said Treskoti, his hands clasping one of the new bolt-throwers, powered by a spring and pressure mechanism. It looked like a series of metal and wooden blocks hammered together.

“I’ve come to collect my books.”

“Oh, but your books are...forgotten. It’s such a shame. I can’t express my disappointment. And Alisa...”

I leaped at him, took him off guard. He lost his balance and leaned backward. The bolt thrower went off, and I heard a thump and a groan. Treskoti threw me off and I hit the floor. He pushed down the lever that ran along the bolt-thrower’s handle but Ister was on him clumsily, nothing but a writer out of his element, and all the more heroic for that. They fell to the ground together and rolled. Treskoti struck Ister in the face, once, twice, three times, each blow landing with force.

I staggered to my feet just as Ister pulled himself up. A bolt protruded from his shoulder like a coat-hook from a wall. Blood flowed down his arm and dripped to the floor.

Treskoti laughed and pulled the lever of his bolt-thrower. I heard a click as the bolt inside the mechanism slotted into the barrel. We were beaten. I would be burned or hanged or drowned or made into a slave. Ister would be a Guardian. He would be forced to live in that space between life and death, never truly one or the other.

Trekoti laughed. “Ister...Ister...So valiant, and yet so ineffective. You were such a nice man. So polite. And now...you’ll be working for us.”

A hideous laugh came from the aisle beside us—there Agee shifted and watched evilly.

“Run at him,” I said to Ister. “Die. Die now.”

And yet Ister smiled a sad smile.

“I like that,” said Treskoti. “No screaming from you. No begging like that pathetic Agee.”

Agee shifted in the darkness, like a frustrated dog that had been beaten too much.

“Oh, but I’m not afraid,” said Ister.

“But you should be,” said Treskoti. “Yes, think of it, as your body melts in exquisite agony, as your entire soul is broken and remade so that it sits unbearably between universes, like being forever on the rack, torn in two. How is it, then, that you’re not afraid?”

Ister held up his hand, and in it he held a pendant, the chain broken.

Treskoti looked at it for a moment, looked down at himself and then his face fell. He turned quickly, but Agee was already on him in a flurry of violence, like a larger dog killing a smaller one, feasting on its innards as the smaller one died. The cries were horrible, and we ran from that scene out across the floor, across Palasin’s hall and to the labyrinth.

Amacus waited at the staircase, pacing. “Oh, and who do we have here?”

“This is Mr Ister, the writer of those books I’ve been reading.”

“Ah, an author...”

“You’ll take us there, won’t you?”

“You’re leaving?”

“I’m sorry, Amacus. I would stay if I could.”

He made a sound then, like boiling soup, and his pacing became ever faster. “I thought...you cared for me.” The sound came again, stronger and more desperate. He stopped pacing and said, “I have to ask just one thing. Mr Ister, you’re latent...will you do something for me? Will you write Alisa here into the Other Side for me? So that I might just have one moment of real, authentic touch. Just one?”

“Write her into the Other Side?”

“Yes, you can do it. I know you can.”

Ister looked at me. “Alisa?”

I looked at Amacus with his bloodhound eyes and his wiry limbs, that sorry creature that I had come to care for. “Yes. For a moment write me into the Other Side.”

We picked up Amacus’ poems and arrived at the reading room. Sitting at the desk, Ister began to write, blood seeping from his shoulder still while Amacus prowled like a caged cat.

“Your pendant will have to go,” said Amacus.

I took it from my neck with trepidation, but for all his anger and sadness, all his alien nature, I had to trust him. If we do not risk ourselves for others, we will forever be alone. He could take me now, and eat my essence, and yet he only prowled to and fro, his wiry limbs animal-like.

When Ister was done, I sat. As I read, the world shifted, somehow, and another book superimposed itself upon the one I read, and yet it shifted a little, so that the superimposition was askew, and I looked behind me and there I could see the Other Side, another world dark and shadowy, superimposed on my own. The walls of another room, a crumbling blackened thing, were somehow beyond the one which I knew, and stairs I had not previously noticed descended from the side of this new room, whose floor was set slightly above the room in which I stood, and everything was set at an odd angle. It was cold and I shuddered and I perceived Amacus for the first time without distortion, the hound-like thing, horrible to behold. Yet still he warped, as he was pulled now to the Other Side, the darkness, and now to my world, the light. Yet he was more centred here, and the bloodied eyelids were a deep dark red, even though everything in this world seemed grey and broken and in shadow.

He stepped towards me. “Alisa.” He held out his hand.

He pulled me to him with those powerful, wiry arms. He embraced me, then, and he was cold and smelled of rottenness. There was something slimy about his skin, a slippery sheen like a corpse’s that has been pulled from the water, though his breath was unnaturally hot in my ear, like the door to a furnace. I felt tiny in those long arms and pressed against that slippery ribcage, and yet strangely safe.

“Thank you Alisa,” he said, “I love you.” His tears came, then, the terrible sobbing of a creature that had known no warmth or love for centuries, that had lived its life in the shadows between everything that had substance. The tears came and fell like acid on my shoulder, and then he quietened himself, his chest heaving.

The agony was unexpected. My entire shoulder was within Amacus’ mouth, his great jaws clamping down upon me. My soul leached out of me, like liquid from a cracked bottle. I pushed with my arms. I struggled and kicked, yet it was no use. I heard Ister’s cry as if from far away and underwater. Those two strange and maddening worlds, superimposed upon each other, shifted and warped. Again I struggled and kicked, but this time more weakly.