Kathleen
walked down an apparently endless broad staircase; she stopped counting at nine
hundred wooden steps. The stairs appeared to be suspended over a vertical
stairwell stretching down below her, as dark as night. Every now and then the
staircase opened on to small landings with a variable numbers of doors off
them. Each door was labelled in archaic eleven with letters, with omega at the
top and slowly working down to alpha. After that were miscellanea, and then the
stack rooms, each again labelled in reverse order, alphabetically. By the time
she reached the bottom of the stairs it was icy cold.
On the way down past the main library levels,
she met a total of three elves and one human walking back up the stairs each on
their own. They all nodded in passing: clearly a human woman walking down this
staircase wasn’t a particularly unexpected sight. She wondered what they had
been looking up and consoled herself with the thought that it probably wasn’t
as unusual as what she was going to read.
Finally she came to the red door at the end
of the staircase: it was embellished with white tracery of a beautifully
rendered magnolia tree. She turned to look back up the stairs and wondered how
long it would take to get back up to the top. She regretted not having any
lunch before rushing down there.
The red door had a big black sign on the wall
next to it that said:
AUTHORISED
PERSONS ONLY: ENTRY ONLY BY TICKET
There was no obvious door handle, so Kathleen
just knocked. The door swung open, revealing a very large airy room full of dim
magical light. There were rows and rows of shelves and cabinets. It looked very
like John’s old Deep Vault, which had been destroyed a few months previously.
She knew all about this sort of room.
‘Hello’ she shouted, ‘Anyone there? I’m
looking for the stack librarian!’
There was no sound. She was reluctant to go
into the room without permission, as she knew that stepping over the threshold
would be stepping into a folded space, which was always a risky business. She’d
rather be invited in – who knew what guarding mechanisms might be in place?
‘Can I come in?’ she shouted again. She
peered into the shadows – no-one appeared to be moving.
It was time to do something useful. She
dipped her hand into a small pocket in her bag and pulled out a tuning fork.
She struck it on the wall and listened to its tone. Then she repeated the
action but this time let the end of the fork just protrude into the stack room.
The tone wavered and then died, quite suddenly. She was right about the room, anyway – a tone
made in this universe died in a folded one. She just hoped that nothing else
would.
‘Librarian’ she yelled, more loudly, ‘is it
safe to enter your extra-dimensional space?’
Again there was no response. Perhaps the
curator was at lunch?
Kathleen put her hand inside her coat and
took a small box out of an inner pocket. She hated using this thing, but it
seemed like there wasn’t much choice.
She opened the box – inside it was a small silver moth, crumpled and
apparently dead. She took it out carefully and put it on her hand, then she
lifted up so that it was at the exact point where the two separate dimensional
spaces met. She lifted her other hand up so that the moth had no choice but to
fly into the room when it was activated.
‘ddeffro’
she said
The moth struggled up on to its six legs and
then took off, flying straight into the stack room. It fluttered gamely for a
few seconds and then dropped like a feather on to the ground and lay completely
still.
She heard a deep female laugh from the
half-illuminated stack room. A voice
appeared in the silence, but there was no body that appeared to be attached to
it.
‘Very good, Dr Mannings’ she said, ‘expert
preparation and just the right level of caution’
‘Can I come in now?’ asked Kathleen,
intensely annoyed by the death of her poor moth, ‘or do you intend to kill me
too?’
The voice laughed again. It was a brittle,
empty laugh.
‘No –
that was just a trick. You’re perfectly safe – we don’t tend to kill our
visiting scholars... all that often’
‘How do I know that it’s safe?’ Kathleen
asked
‘I’m a University employee’ said the voice,
dry as dust, ‘your safety is in my contract’
Kathleen still looked sceptical. She took a
step back.
‘And’ continued the voice, ‘Mr Ismay would
come looking for you eventually, and there would be a serious diplomatic
incident’
‘Show yourself first’ demanded Kathleen, ‘I
want to know who and what you are’
‘Have it your way’ said the voice.
The librarian uncoiled from her position
hidden behind a cabinet. She was a ten foot long python with bright green eyes.
Her serpentine head rose up to the level of the door and swayed backwards and
forwards in front of Kathleen’s pale face.
‘I’m a Naga’ she said, ‘we guard the lost
things that are not meant to be found’
No comments:
Post a Comment