The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [122]
This place can't exist, he thought. Am I hallucinating?
He approached the nearest stack of books. It towered over him, disappeared above his head. This isn't right, he thought.
And then he saw it.
There was a small, official-looking note attached to the side of the stack in the green metal of the lizards. It said: BODLEIAN LIBRARY. UNDERGROUND STACK 228. AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
He stared at it. Of course, he had heard the rumours… It was said nearly every book in the English language was held at the Bodleian, and books in many other languages besides. It was said that each year, the collection grew by more than one hundred thousand books and an equal number of periodicals, and that these volumes expanded the shelving requirements by about two miles annually. Two miles a year! How big was the place?
What had Coleridge written of the Bodleian? "Through caverns measureless to man…" Orphan said quietly, and was startled by the sound of his own voice. This was the Bookman's hideaway?
Underneath the notice, in smaller letters, something else was written. Orphan peered at it and read it aloud. It was an oath:
I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; nor to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library;
and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.
He thought of the books he had crashed into and froze. I should go back, he thought frantically. Tidy them. Make sure they're fine. Fire. I don't have any matches. Good.
He turned away at last, reluctantly. He had to find the Bookman.
He walked through the stacks. Everywhere he looked books towered into the air, the volumes seeming to whisper to him as he walked.
No. The whispering was real, he thought. And worse: things moved in the corners of his eyes, shadows leaping away from his sight. The egg seemed to grow hot against his chest and he reached for it and took it out. Once he held it in his hand the phenomenon grew worse: the whispers seemed to resolve themselves into words, almost comprehensible, the murmur of a crowd of people each carrying on an individual conversation.
There!
Something moved, too fast for him to notice details, only a vague shape skulking behind a stack of books. For the first time he felt fear. Things lived down here. For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers. Then the egg glowed brightly in his hand and he felt it awakening, a sort of reaching out, a hesitant seeking, and in a part of his mind a direction took shape.
He followed it.
In the eerie half-light he could see the stacks spreading away from him until they disappeared in immeasurable distance, forming a pattern too complex for him to understand, shapes of stars and pentagrams, mapped islands in a vast ocean. He navigated through this landscape of old paper, the direction in his head growing stronger as he followed it. The whispering grew. He didn't know if it were real, or only in his head. The shadows leaped and bounced and skulked around him, following him, always at the edge of sight. He felt a nervousness overcome him, weakening his hands. For a moment he almost dropped the egg.
A real, a definitely real sound filled the air, and he froze.
It was a very human scream.
THIRTY-SIX
The Soul of the New Machine
In the midst of the word he was trying to say, In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away – For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
– Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"
He came running into a clearing in the book-fields.