It had been there a long, long, long time. There before the swamp, there before the silt, there before the sandstone and the storms and the long cool nights and the gouging of the glaciers and the inky blackness of the ashes in the air.
A certain small space where things were quiet.
It was not a big space. Walk across it and you’re there and gone in moments or less depending on your leg length. But it was very firm, and very fair. Ferns were chewed in it with softened, careful mouths. The heaviest treads weighed in feather-light within its borders. If something was being disembowelled its mouth did not move and even the entrails were quiet as they slithered out over each other. Shssh. Shhssh-shusshh.
But that was then, then.
And this is now.
Before now, when they came to the new place, they found it there, that certain small space. And most of them didn’t like it. They knew that sounds were meant for living souls, and that life was inherently noisy. They knew that small children were made of surging energy and growth and that an awful lot of that came out as yells and shrieks and whines and laughs. They knew they didn’t belong there, and they treated it as such, and were happier for it.
Except for Agnes, who wandered through it over and over and liked what she didn’t hear. So she built a little home on its borders, and took tiny walks through its borders, and grew a small garden at its heart. She doted on it, though it never gave her anything other than the smallest, most stunted tubers, and she left her children in it whenever they irritated her too much and she couldn’t be bothered.
Once upon a long time later, Agnes’s heart gave out a sigh during one of her walks and never raised its voice again. When they found her – reluctantly – two of her children came to the funeral: one to see the body, the other to take up the house.
The first was too wise to leave anything, even her name, but the second was called Heloise.
Heloise also liked the quiet, but she disliked gardens. She spent a long, dirty month gutting out the remains of her mother’s tubers and herbs and blossoms, arms filthy to the elbows with clinging silt and spackled mud. Their roots were much deeper than they looked, and their grasp tenacious.
When she was done, she built a new home, larger than her mother’s home, which was now a toolshed. And she filled this home with herself, and it came to be that most of herself was made of paper and bound in leather, more and more as time went on. Near the end of Heloise’s life most of the sounds she made were rustling, and most of the rustling she made was when she slept, relaxed from the stress and dangers of the day.
She wasn’t like her mother, not at all. When her time came she ran through the town square, squeaking and screaming and slamming her head against anything that came to hand until she came upon a likely cobble and sufficient vigor.
After that the space was quiet, and left to its own devices, and this was, perhaps, the biggest mistake so far.
Then they decided they needed a library, and this was no longer the case.
It is a good library now.
Heloise’s halls were built very poorly for a human to live in, but their criss-crossing, multi-chasmed ways are perfect roosts for books. They have room to see each other from farther aisles, and to confer at night. And the size of the rooms bring echoes upon echoes upon echoes, so that if a single noise is in danger of being made the sheer oppressive weight of it will crush itself in self-shame.
There are small discreet signs in each room, each bearing the traditional warning of a library, long after any library ceased to use them. A modern librarian would have fixed that. A modern librarian would have sorted, filed, and categorized the books. A modern librarian would have locked the doors each evening and gone home and eaten and gone to bed and woken up and said words to other humans and travelled back each morning.
This is no difficulty for the library because it has never had a librarian at all. It prefers it this way. There is less noise, and less fuss.
There are not many visitors to the library. Nobody has a membership card. The doors stick in the damp and it never stops being damp and the steps are slick and treacherous grey slate.
Now and then, someone drops by. They have no idea what they are doing or know it exactly and it’s very hard to say which is more dangerous, but they always mind the signs, and they always read them carefully.
Please be quiet for it is its own reward.
Please be quiet for the consideration of other readers.
Please be quiet for the sake of tradition.
Please be quiet because the books are listening to you and they learn quickly and the shelves that hold them are so very thin so very very very thin and small and only made of wood, dear small frail bent dead wood, and they are words.
And if the visitor is very, very persistent or simply too dense to leave, they will make their way along through the uneven and overflowing corridors and they will always come to the same place by the same path at the same pace, footsteps sinking into footsteps like travellers crossing snow. A little room with a locked door, swung half-open, buried underneath a tower of twisting stacks that sway at the pace of mountains mating.
On the door is a worn sign, obviously scribbled by someone in either a hurry or a panic, and that sign says
QUIET
and it is not a command.
That library won’t stand forever. The books have grown fat and cumbersome and bloated; they’re ready to pop, ready to go to seed. The walls will cave in at last. It’s only stone and wood after all.
And what it’s holding is so much older.