Chapter 5 #2
I nodded. I was too fuzzy to speak. A long curved hallway lined with white subway tiles and lit with track lighting along the concrete floor, walls, and ceiling was revealed. Out of the darkness and into the light we went.
The tunnel ended abruptly at another metal door with the same web of lasers and Olive repeated the same process, disappearing through the metal, then Tariq, followed by Miles and me. It was very disorienting, and when I stepped into the main room, it took me a moment to get my bearings.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a laboratory type of room where they examined old books under bright fluorescent lights with beakers bubbling all around them.
Why beakers would be bubbling I had no idea.
My imagination was not that specific. Or perhaps I thought it would be a dank and musty dungeon-like room where the chairs were hard, the room was cold, and they worked by candlelight. This proved inaccurate as well.
Instead, the most beautiful library I had ever seen was spread out before me.
We crossed a decorative parquet floor much like the one upstairs.
Several wooden worktables piled with books filled the center of the room.
Along the walls, three stories of bookcases ran floor to ceiling, with two spiral staircases leading to the upper levels, which were set back behind fancy wrought iron railings.
I leaned back to take it all in and noted the glorious domed ceiling overhead.
It was painted to resemble the sky, bright blue with fluffy white clouds, giving me the sense of being outside even though we were three stories below ground.
My heart swelled in my chest as I immediately fell in love with the place.
“Glorious, isn’t it?” Tariq asked.
“It’s okay.” I shrugged and then sighed. The library deserved better than that and so did Tariq. “Honestly, it’s spectacular.”
He grinned and then laughed as if he appreciated my honesty.
“Shall we begin?” Miles asked. He gestured for me to follow him. I didn’t hesitate. We climbed the spiral staircase to the right. On the upper floor, the items were housed neatly on shelves with a lone papyrus on display in a thick glass case in front of the shelving unit.
“This is our collection of Egyptian papyri,” Miles said. “These particular scrolls are considered to be of the dubious sort because they contain rituals and spells and other arcane information.”
I glanced through the glass at the papyrus on display. “That’s the Egyptian god Set or Seth. Isn’t he the master of chaos in the form of storms and war?”
Miles nodded. “Which is exactly why we keep the papyrus down here. We wouldn’t want any spells involving such a trickster to get into the wrong hands.”
I frowned. As a librarian, I was a hardcore believer in the freedom of information.
The only way to combat ignorance was through knowledge, and locking away books, or in this case papyri, was never a solution in my opinion.
This was like keeping all tales of folklore out of the public’s hands.
Wasn’t it? Doubt started to seep into my being like smoke under a closed door. I turned away from the papyrus.
The collection was vast and I tried to wrap my head around the idea that over the millennia so many writings had been created that were considered “of dubious origin.” There were more papyri, tablets, illuminated manuscripts, and printed folios in a wide array of European languages.
We were leaving the third floor when I heard something purr.
“Do you have a cat in here?” I asked.
“No.” Miles said. He began to walk down the steps. I started to follow him, but I heard the purring sound again.
I turned to the bookcase beside me, thinking a cat was loose in the shelves. That couldn’t be good.
A dark gray volume caught my eye and as I peered closer, a tail dropped from the spine. What?! I reached out and tentatively stroked the furry spine of the book with my index finger. The purring became louder.
“Miles!” I stared at the book, watching the tail swish back and forth.
Miles climbed back up the stairs and joined me. “Oh, how nice. You’ve met Freya.”
“It’s a book,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But it purrs.”
“Quite loudly,” he agreed. He didn’t sound nearly as freaked-out as I felt he should. “She likes to have her ears scratched, too.”
“Ears?”
“Here.” Miles reached forward and gently removed the book from the shelf. “She’s usually shy around newcomers. She must approve of you.”
It looked like an ordinary book. You know, if books had tails. But when he turned it so the cover was facing up, a cat’s face blinked out at me from the center of the book, and the corners of the cover twitched as if they were actually ears. The eyes moved from Miles to me.
“What sort of book is that?” I cried. “I mean, is it a book or is it a cat? And if it’s a cat, why is it shelved?” My distress was evident in my voice and the purring stopped and the eyes shut. I glanced at the spine. Sure enough, even the tail had disappeared.
Miles stroked the spine of the book and made soothing sounds.
“There, there, Freya. You’re all right.” He gently shelved the book.
He glanced at me and said, “Freya is a rare book of Norse mythology. You can read her if you like. You know, if she lets you, because…well…cat. Also, it’s written in ancient Norse, so you’d need to know that, too. ”
I shook my head. This went beyond dubious origins and veered right into weird. “That…I…” I asked the only question I could formulate. “Is she called Freya because the cat in Norse mythology is the goddess Freya’s sacred animal?”
“Precisely.” Miles beamed at me. “You really are unusually knowledgeable about all subjects.”
I didn’t say anything but stared at the dark gray book, wondering if I’d just imagined the purring, the tail, and the cat face.
“No, you didn’t imagine it.” Miles offered me no more explanation than that and turned to start back down the winding spiral staircase again.
I tried to put the strange book out of my mind.
I told myself it had to be a novelty item that they shelved in here for fun.
But I didn’t believe me and I felt something inside me shift that could only be described as an awakening.
I tried to clamp it down, but it was like an active child begging to be let out to play.
I frowned. I simply wasn’t ready to reconsider letting magic into my life and breaking the promise I’d made to my mother.
The first floor was much like the ones above, with bookshelves running along the perimeter of the room. On the sturdy worktables amid the books, I spotted a microscope and a magnifying glass as well as several archival boxes like the one Olive had been about to put my mysterious book into.
“Do you focus on conservation or preservation with the materials you receive?” I asked.
“Because of the nature of our department, we strive to preserve the item exactly as it was when it became part of our collection.”
“So if a book’s been damaged in a fire, you do nothing?” I asked.
Olive stepped out of a narrow door in between two shelving units. “We consider the damage sustained as part of the object’s story.”
That seemed an interesting take to me, but I’d never worked with ancient materials before.
“However, if an item’s origin is deemed not dubious, then we send it up to the regular collection, where the librarians can determine whether it warrants conservation or not,” Tariq added.
He was seated at a table on the far side of the room, with a book in front of him that even from several yards away I could see it was of the Hiberno-Saxon style, much like the Book of Kells from the ninth century.
It had elaborate Irish-Celtic initials, which blended beautifully with the Anglo-Saxon zoomorphic interlacing and preference for bright colors.
The mere thought that I could be in the same room with a rare tome from the year 800 made me woozy. No wonder I was seeing cats.
“Maybe I’ve been a public librarian for too long,” I said, “but it doesn’t feel right to have all of these volumes locked away. I mean, shouldn’t people have access to these materials?”
Olive’s split eyebrow lifted. The disdain in her gaze almost made me flinch. Almost.
“Follow me.” It was an order. She crossed to an alcove on the far side of the room. It was darker than the others even though it had the same overhead lighting. My spine tingled and not in a good way. This shelving unit gave me the same feeling of foreboding as the book that had brought me here.
Olive gestured to the section of books and I noted that many were old, as in hundreds of years old, with unrecognizable symbols on their spines. I was shocked at the malevolence I felt pulsing from the bookcase. It made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.
I scanned the shelves until my gaze was caught by an unprepossessing burgundy volume in the middle of the bookcase.
It was shorter than the others and appeared faded and worn.
An image came to mind of a frozen heart encased in ice within the book’s cracked leather.
The withered heart clenched like a fist as if it could punch its way to freedom and unleash a merciless evil upon us all.
A shiver rippled through me from head to toe.
Olive’s eyes narrowed and she scrutinized my face, her eyes widened slightly in surprise. “You feel El Corazón , don’t you?”
I didn’t answer. The fact that she used the Spanish word for heart and described exactly what I’d seen did not help the acute discomfort I was feeling.
I tried to shake it off. These were just books.
But as I glanced at the small, dark red volume, I knew that this collection and that book in particular were much more than that.
“Whose heart is it?”