“I don’t want to.”
Trevor’s father looked at him with his eyebrows in that particular way and he knew it was already over. “Trevor, whose fault is it the book is overdue?”
Trevor looked at his shoes. They were normal – dirty, badly-tied, slightly blue underneath thick grime – and he felt somewhat foolish for checking on them. “Mine,” he admitted.”
“And whose responsibility is it to fix that mistake?”
“…mine.”
“Attaboy. Go on.”
So sighing, slouching, and shameful, Trevor left his home with bag in hand and heart of lead, slinking southwards towards destiny.
The sun seemed a bit dim today, he thought. The seagulls delighted in his misfortune, and aimed their calls at him and him alone. Loser, they called loudly. Sap. Chump. Dope. Simp.
He ignored them. What the hell did birds know anyways? Eggs. Well, eggs to them.
Alas, his mind had wandered and now his destination was in sight. Small, round, and shingled, the county library stood before him. Brightly-coloured letters filled one of its windows – the children’s area – and for a second Trevor’s feet halted, tempted by memories of younger days.
But that wasn’t where the book in his bag belonged, and so he walked across the street to the titanic, brutalist, and incredibly concrete edifice of the libary.
***
He was challenged immediately, of course. As per libary protocol.
The first warning sign was the drops hitting Trevor’s shoulder. Rain, he thought. And then maybe hail. But it was fragments of stone, and with a loud and angry grunt the manticore tore itself free from the decorative fresco above the libary door and landed in front of him with a weight that eclipsed a ton of bricks.
“Answer ye these riddles three,” it croaked in a voice like a frog that had eaten a lion.
“’kay,” muttered Trevor. He felt the urge to look at his shoes again rising, and fought powerfully against it.
“Name?”
“Trevor.”
“FULL name.”
“Trevor Bartholomew Hendricks.”
“Card?”
Trevor held up his hand and the manticore licked it. The acrid saliva stung his skin and the rough tongue made his palm tingle, even as the blood rushed to the surface and formed an intricate pattern. The sound of dying doves filled his ears and he could smell burning hair.
“Purpose?”
“Late return,” he mumbled. Oh shoot he’d looked at his shoes again without meaning to.
“HAH! Fourth door.”
And with that the manticore hurled itself into the air and lodged itself in the fresco again, next to the screaming frozen faces of all those who’d entered the libary and asked if they had video games or films or cassettes.
***
It was dark inside. Cold. Dry. Trevor had seen a documentary once on Antarctica, and when the camera rolled over the endless ice plains and the dead mountains he’d thought he’d never seen a place more like the libary in all his life.
Except for the penguins. The libary was mournfully bereft of penguins.
Disappointing lack of flightless fowl aside, the greatest feature of the cavernous, lightless hall of the libary’s entryway was the obelisk of pure granite cut from a mountain’s colon. On it were engraved the three rules of the libary.
1: RETURN ON TIME OR PAY THE PRICE
2: QUIET
3: OBEY
Trevor did as he was told, cringing at every shuffled step his feet took through the draft-ridden air.
The halls were endless. Each shelf stretched on long enough for a human lifetime to end a trillion times over before its end was reached. Dewey would’ve disemdecimaled himself rather than set eyes upon it.
Trevor shut his eyes and felt his way along until he felt something hard and metallic and handle-like under his hands.
“One,” he muttered, and let it go. Behind it, something hissed in disappointment.
A rough-hewn slab rocked at his touch, balance on a pivot so finely-tuned that a passing breeze could’ve made it swing wide.
“Two.” He thought he heard a rustle as he moved on, but that could’ve been anything or nothing.
About an hour after ‘two’ Trevor stopped for lunch in a half-empty bookcase, tucked out of sight behind a discarded pile of expired magazines. He stared at the underside of the shelf above him as he swallowed his baloney and mustard, and traced with his fingers an etching made by a long-lust fellow traveller.
‘andi sux diks’ it read. What did it mean? He might never know.
By what his watch said MIGHT be nightfall he found three, and three was this.
This, specifically, was a huge iron knob, so massive a normal human would need a monkey wrench to stand a prayer of moving it.
“Three,” he said, and hurried away while it was still silent.
The fourth handle moved easily under his hand, and as it did so Trevor chanted to himself.
“Pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm, pleasenochasm – shit.”
It was the chasm.
The aisle he found himself looking down was six feet wide and the ceiling was twenty feet high and the floor was infinitely far beneath his feet, lost in damp grey mists that groaned and screamed with the cries of the elder beasts of the libary as they fought and fucked and complained with each other.
Trevor wished it had been the arena of blood. He didn’t like heights.
His bag’s strap went between his teeth, his shoes went around his neck, and his toes clung to shelves with the careful dexterity and lack of grace of a very slow and stupid monkey, or maybe just a sloth. Halfway down the aisle he had to stop as a questing tendril from below drifted by, hunting for prey, but it contented itself with a shelf of poetry and left him be after a half hour of cramping, aching waiting.
At last he reached the far end of the unending row, leaned far over, slipped, caught himself on the door’s handle, and fell face first into an airless inky void that sucked him in like plankton in front of a whale’s snout.
***
Alone, he floated. Or rather, floating was occurring. This was a place too vast for individual beings to matter.
The Libarians surrounded, waiting. Not for anyone or anything. They just waited. Space expanded, time continued, the Libarians waited. Anything else was impossible, contrary to the very nature of reality’s keystones. You might as well ask gravity to turn itself off, or electromagnetism to consider trying harder.
DUE, they chanted. DUE, DUE, DUE. OVER. OVER DUE OVER DUE OVER.
The offering came to them in a bag woven from primitive matter that had once imagined itself to be animate.
A vial of mercury and tears.
A cannister of frankincense.
The memory of a childhood day, frozen in ice so pure it contained no hydrogen nor oxygen.
And the last known copy of that inscrutable and incomprehensible tome, Madame Malarkin’s Magnificent Murders: Vol IV, The Big Jabloni.
ACCEPTED, they chanted. ACCEPTED ACCEPTED ACCEPTED. FINE PAID PAID PAID PAID FINE PAID.
And Trevor was eating his breakfast cereal with an ache in his brain and a searing pain in his liver.
“Woah!” said a voice, a normal voice, transmitted through vibrations in the air. Father. “Y’okay?”
“Ow,” agreed Trevor, clutching his skull and his side and his soul in one complicated crouch.
“Ah. Sent you back early again, did they?”
“Mng-hngh.”
“Well, chin up. You didn’t leave for another six minutes, so you can skip breakfast this go-around and throw up if you need to. Here’s the book. It’ll be fine, eh? Three thousandth time is the charm.”