Ex Libris Read online

“I lost the string!” she yelled.

  “Least of our worries! Hang on,” Bucephalus called. She wrenched her gaze around and saw that the wall of books had closed in front of them. The stacks were sealing themselves. There was no way out.

  Bucephalus coiled himself like a tremendous spring and leaped into the air, hooves reaching spasmodically. She got a fistful of his mane somehow and clung, feeling her body fly out behind him like a banner. He struck the bookcase halfway up, banked off it, and somehow twisted in midair to leap even higher. And then they were cantering along the top of the book cases, a path no wider than the length of Euclavia’s forearm, with the bat-creatures flocking in hot pursuit, throwing themselves down to pull Euclavia’s hair and try to blind the centaur.

  She’d either dragged herself onto Bucephalus’ back, or he had tossed her there. She clutched across his chest, fastening her hands together, as bookcase after bookcase slid into the sides of the long rank they ran along and locked there. At least it had the effect of making their path wider.

  They came to the end. “Hang on,” Bucephalus called again—she would have dinged him for repetition if she’d been able to get half a breath—and he leaped. Down, all that distance to the hard wooden floor below while the ragged wings of the bat-creatures fluttered and jostled and squealed around them.

  She’d been wrong. It wasn’t too far for him to jump. He landed running, hooves plowing long splinters from the boards, and the shock of it nearly knocked Euclavia’s pelvis into her sternum. If she hadn’t been gritting her teeth, she suspected she would have bitten her tongue off; as it was, she chipped a tooth and swallowed the sharp shard that resulted.

  Then she chipped another, and nearly busted her nose as Bucephalus set his haunches, slithered to a halt, and she smacked into the back of his skull face-first.

  “Shit!” she yelled, letting go of him to grab her stinging face. “Shit!”

  “Eu,” Bucephalus warned, not turning.

  She lifted her gaze over his shoulder. He still crouched, half-sitting, weight as far back as he could lean it. His front hooves teetered on the edge of an open lip, a drop down into a pit some thirty feet below. The air was pleasantly dry, cool—the perfect environment for old books. A sign hung above them, in illuminated letters.

  The pit was full of books, books housed in an immense spiraling labyrinth of curved cases. And at their center, head bowed over something minuscule, was a creature so gigantic that even from this distance and height, she seemed to tower over them. She had enormous wings like a bat’s, folded tight, and she seemed to be holding whatever she was looking at in their two forward-reaching fingers. Her long tail curled around her hind feet, and her crested head was set in a long neck, which she had curved into a serpentine. She was a silvery violet-gray, scaled all over except for the furry patches at her cheeks and along her underbelly. As the bat-things settled on the rim of the pit beside them, their pursuit and harassment forgotten, Euclavia could now see a kinship between them and the giant dragonish thing under the illuminated sign that read Special Collections.

  “The Book Wyrm,” Euclavia said, awed. “I didn’t think she was real.”

  Bucephalus held up the slip of paper in his hand. The call number scribbled on it flamed star-brilliant, achingly silver. “I think we’re here,” he whispered. “I guess that’s the Special Collections Librarian.”

  The enormous wyrm lifted her head from the tiny book balanced delicately upon her wing-talons. She raised what could have been an eyebrow behind her horn-rimmed glasses.

  She said, “Shhh!”

  They stood silent for a moment, staring across the space to the Librarian. The Librarian stared back. Euclavia felt Bucephalus’s frozen, quivering shock between her knees. She felt the slow drip of blood, thick and sticky, from her nose. She watched the dragon’s velvet nostrils flare as if it scented them.

  She couldn’t look it in the enormous, variegated silver eyes. She looked down, and realized that it was crouched on a pile of bleached bones.

  “Why,” Bucephalus whispered, “didn’t I finish my dis six years ago, when I should have done? I could be tenure track by now somewhere.”

  “I see you have pull slips,” the Librarian said conversationally. “Hand them here, would you?”

  A bat-thing swooped down and plucked the paper from Bucephalus’ fingers. Another circled, descending toward Euclavia, and she dug hastily in her pockets to find her pull slip before the monstrous little cannibal reached her. She shuddered when the white-gloved talons brushed her flesh.

  The wyrm accepted both bits of paper with a delicacy of touch Euclavia, despite herself, found astounding. If she were on the scale the Librarian was, she wouldn’t have been able to manage that task with a magnifying glass and tweezers. The Librarian, though, seemed to read both slips without difficulty.

  She tapped a pile beside her and said, “Yes, we have these. You can’t take them away from here, though. Special Collections don’t circulate.”

  “Oh,” said Euclavia.

  Bucephalus sidled.

  The Wyrm said. “And this one—the food science one—well, it’s in my personal to-read pile. Re-read, actually, as I read it when we got it in, but there are never enough new books, are there? I don’t suppose you’d mind waiting until I finish?”

  “Not at all,” said Euclavia, with a sinking feeling. “When do you think you might get to it?”

  “Oh,” said the wyrm. “Right now it’s about five hundred thousand and eleven. Wait, no! Five hundred thousand and four. I forgot—three of those ahead of it are in multiple volumes.”

  Euclavia laid a hand on Bucephalus’s shoulder. To steady herself, not him. He was like a rock. Maybe they could go out and come back later? She shuddered to think about it, and shuddered worse when she remembered that she had lost the twine and they didn’t know their way out unless they found it.

  She said, “How long might it take you to get through those others?”

  “No more than a century,” said the wyrm. “I read quickly.” She tapped the pile again. “The alchemy book, though. I can pull that one for your friend right now. I just finished rereading it a few years ago and haven’t put it back in the hold list yet. Then maybe you and I can have a nice chat while he reads it. It’s so seldom that I have interesting visitors.” The bones rustled under her weight as she resettled herself. “And they never stay long enough once they get here.”

  “They leave again?” Bucephalus asked. His voice was steady but Euclavia knew it was an act. She could feel the shivers running through him.

  “They usually starve,” the wyrm admitted. She stirred her bones.

  One of the bat-wing things fluttered down before Bucephalus. It dangled a thin, black-bound quarto in white-gloved claws.

  He hesitated and it warbled at him, a funny sound almost too high to hear. He reached out gingerly and accepted the volume. The bat-thing released it and fluttered away, long tail lashing.

  Euclavia nerved herself and said to the dragon, “You don’t suppose I could just jump ahead of you? I only need to read one chapter. It won’t take more than a half hour, I imagine.” She held up a pencil. “I won’t get any ink near it.”

  “Well,” said the Librarian thoughtfully. “No, I don’t think so. I’m ahead of you on the hold list, you see. That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”

  “No,” said Euclavia. “I suppose it wouldn’t.”

  The wyrm raked again at the piles of bones. Euclavia thought of being trapped here forever, too big to leave, for so long that you’d already read every book in an infinite library multiple times.

  She thought about what it would be like for her and Bucephalus to sit here and entertain this dragon with conversation until they starved, and then were skeletonized by her—Offspring? Symbiotes? Hench-things?—and were added to the comfortable rakings of her nest.

  She said, “What if I traded you something to let me take your place on the hold list? Then you could add yourself again.”

/>   “Irregular,” said the dragon. She pushed her spectacles up her snout with one hooked talon, though, and frowned as if interested.

  “Still,” Bucephalus said, who was obviously not as fear-stupefied as Euclavia had thought him.

  The dragon said, “What do you have in mind?”

  “Well,” said Bucephalus, and Euclavia could have kissed him, “Euclavia and I are both writing books, it happens. We need these sources to finish them.”

  “Hmmm,” said the dragon.

  “But we can’t finish them if we stay here and entertain you until we starve,” Euclavia said, picking up the centaur’s thread when the wyrm turned her silver eyes on him and he began to stammer. “Let us use the sources and take notes, and show us the way back—and we’ll bring you copies of our books before anybody else has read them!”

  The dragon settled, folding her wings one over the other. She directed at the both of them a speculative, skeptical look. “You’re asking me to trade something that I have, here, today—for something entirely hypothetical. Something that you may never complete.”

  “But I have,” Euclavia said, desperately. “It is completed. That’s why I’m here. I gave it to my tutor and he said I needed one more source.” She pointed to the pile the wyrm had tapped with her fore-talon. “A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spirituous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy. By Frederick Accum. That’s it; that’s all I need. One cite, and my book is finished.”

  She waited. She didn’t speak. The wyrm didn’t speak either. Bucephalus held his breath, his knuckles white on the covers of his alchemy text.

  They could try to run. But Euclavia remembered the festering body in the stacks, and guessed in her heart how that would work out.

  “New books,” Euclavia said, temptingly.

  Behind her, one of the bat-things giggled and chittered.

  “Two books,” said the dragon. “New books. Books nobody else has read before me.”

  “Just us,” Euclavia said. “My tutor, but he won’t have read the new material. Not until after you do. And nobody’s seen Bucephalus’s book yet. Have they, Bucephalus?”

  He shivered. She squeezed his shoulder. “No,” he said. “No, they haven’t.”

  The dragon blinked, slowly, and fluffed her frill. Then she said, in a sonorous tone, “We have a bargain. But if it goes unfulfilled in prompt fashion, I do charge thee, small creatures. Remember that a Librarian makes a very bad enemy.”

  They read under the dragon’s watchful eye.

  Then, the bat-things led them back to the twine, which was still whole and, miraculously, waiting for them. And the twine led them out: hungry and exhausted, footsore, leaning on one another, but giddy with the luck of being alive. They clutched their pencil-scribbled notes against their chests. They walked and slept and walked again.

  When they came at last through the warrens of the far-flung Children’s Section, within sight of the great archway to reception and the eldritch glow of the EXIT sign, only then did Bucephalus turn to Euclavia and say to her in a confiding tone, “You owe me.”

  And Euclavia, light-headed with giddiness, said, “You mean, you owe me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well,” she said, and grinned. “You pretty much have to finish your dissertation now.”

  The King of the Big Night Hours

  Richard Bowes

  At the moment the first kid jumped off a library balcony I was on the phone in my office. In what I eventually saw as more uncanny than coincidental, my friend Alex and I were trying to remember the last time either of us had seen the guy who called himself the King of the Big Night Hours.

  Alex lives out in Jersey now but years ago he worked with me at the university. “Is the gym still open late?” he asked and chuckled at the memory. “That’s where I remember him. He was hot looking.”

  My answer was, yes it was still open. I remembered the big West Indian who did a lot for the university security uniform he wore. His bearing as much as looks defined the King.

  At that instant, shouts echoed in the atrium and I heard a big, hollow thud like a quarter ton of laundry had hit the marble floor.

  I did not immediately rush out to see what had happened. It was the Friday of the first week of the fall semester and the library hummed with kids. I thought it was one more damn student thing.

  The screams got me off the phone and onto the ninth floor balcony. The center of the university library is a twelve-story atrium. Balconies line each floor and flying staircases connect each balcony with the ones above and below it. Railings of four-and-a-half foot tall vertical brass spikes were all that separated those balconies and stairs from the wide, empty interior space.

  Right then those railings were lined with spectators who stared down in silence. The atrium floor is polished marble decorated with in an intricate gray, white, and black geometrical pattern. A man lay sprawled face down on the marble floor surrounded by a splatter of impact blood.

  Seeing him, I visualized his downward path, saw the floor flying towards his face. From above, the pattern on the floor can create the illusion it’s coming towards the viewer. Staring down at the still body, the pattern seemed to fill my vision. I managed to turn away before I was mesmerized.

  At times like these, it helps to have a function, something to do. Some of the students who stared were wide eyed, hypnotized by what they had seen. Right then, acting on impulse, violating university protocol, I touched the students, tapped each one on the back, then put my hands on their shoulders and turned them around. “Don’t look,” I said. “It doesn’t help.”

  Sirens sounded outside. Uniformed police and EMS medics came through the front doors with their radios blasting.

  One kid whom I’d turned around stared straight ahead looking horrified; tears stood in her eyes. “I was on the balcony talking on my cell phone,” she told me. “And I saw him climb onto the railing up on the tenth floor. I yelled at him, ‘What are you doing?’ Then he went over the side. I could have run up those stairs and stopped him.”

  She repeated this a few times. She told me her name was Marie Rose. Glancing over the railing I saw the medics at work on the body. I kept telling her I knew how she felt but that she had done everything she could.

  When the silent crowds on the balconies stirred I looked again and saw they had the jumper on a stretcher. Everyone watched in absolute silence as he was rolled across the atrium and out the door.

  “Come sit down,” I said.

  Yellow crime scene tape was being strung around the area of the floor with the spattered blood. A nursing student who came upstairs said she had heard the EMTs say the kid’s heart had stopped but that they had gotten it beating before they took him away.

  The Science Reference desk is through a glass door opening from the ninth floor balcony, and it’s where I usually worked. The librarian who had been on duty through the whole incident badly needed to get away for a while.

  So I sat at the desk with Marie Rose and asked about her studies. She was taking a masters in French lit and I got her to talk about that.

  While she did, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I’d jumped up at the first shouts and gone out on the balcony. Could I have gotten to the man before he went over the railing? What if I’d begun moving at the first mention of the King?

  Police began to appear on the upper floors. A couple of detectives went through the building asking for witnesses. I looked to Marie Rose. She nodded and went over to them.

  A very young uniformed cop had been sent upstairs to find the jumper’s personal effects. I took him to the tenth floor and we looked at piles of books and papers, backpacks abandoned as people ran out to see what had happened. Many of them had yet to return. Nobody was even sure if the jumper had been studying on the floor.
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br />   The cop was nervous and a little pale and I wondered if maybe he’d been given this assignment because he was having trouble with the blood downstairs. After a while, we found a blue backpack with a bunch of suicide poetry: books by Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath. And I said, “I’m afraid this is what we’re looking for.”

  When I was back at the desk, a young man asked me very quietly, “Is there another way out? I want to leave but I don’t ever want to cross the atrium.” Flashes came from where the technicians were taking pictures of the spot where the body had landed. Looking down I could see reporters at the front door questioning the people who left.

  I asked aloud who wanted to go out the back way. Half a dozen patrons responded and I brought them down in the freight elevator and out past the trash and garbage on the loading dock.

  Guard George Robins, who had been at the university as long as I had, was leaning back against a wall with his hand over his eyes breathing hard. It occurred to me as we passed him that Guard Robins had known the King.

  I had been working in the building since it had opened almost exactly thirty years before. Even though it was against university regulations, no one thought to stop me when I opened the back door and let out everyone who had followed me.

  When I got back upstairs, another bunch of students wanted to leave and I took them down, too, and let them out. Robins was drinking coffee one of the secretaries had brought him. He’d been the first to get to the body. “I just heard he’s dead in the emergency room,” he told me. This was not the moment to ask him about the King.

  The police were through with the site where the kid had landed. I stood at a door that led out into the atrium. The building maintenance foremen spoke in Spanish to one of the porters who refused to look at him.

  Hector was the porter’s name and he trudged out onto the floor with a water cart and a mop and started to clean up the blood. It was obvious this bothered him.

  I saw the head of Reference standing with other administrators and went and told her I’d been letting people out the back way. She said it was fine. I had been there so long that when I did things like this it was assumed somehow I was following precedent.