Ex Libris Read online

  As I gathered up my things, I imagined her reading the note. I had no idea what rare sequelae might result from book tattoos—would she call an ambulance? I went back and added: “It’s a problem with the dose on my medication; I’ll get it fixed.” She knew I was on meds; I’d deliberately let her see the sertraline when I took my morning pills. Another thing I didn’t feel like being coy about. And it was true about the dosage problem. After a year with no insurance, my new doctor wanted to start slowly; the amount I was taking now might work for an anxious supermodel, but for a big girl like me it barely made a dent.

  Outside, heat slammed my lungs. I squinted against the blinding afternoon sun, trying to catch my breath. Halfway to the parking lot, sweat soaked my shirt; just walking felt disgusting. Skin and cloth stuck to each other and peeled away, again and again. By the time I got to the car, my legs were shaking and my heart still hadn’t slowed. I felt short of breath, and couldn’t tell whether I was hyperventilating or just having trouble with the humidity.

  The first blast of AC cleared my head enough for me to realize that no way in hell should I drive like this. After a minute of circling the need-to-get-home/can’t-go-home paradox, I gave in and called David. Skyped, actually—still just in range of the campus wi-fi, I needed to see him more desperately than I needed him not to see me in sweat-stained dishabille.

  The phone sang its reassuring trying-to-connect melody, less reassuring as it went on and I wondered if I’d misremembered his class schedule. Or he could be with a student, or in a meeting, or just too busy. But finally, with a satisfied plink, the video came through.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “Hey, pretty boy.” It was ritual exchange, but at least my end of it was true. My fiancé was a beautiful red-haired Nordic type who could rock a Viking helmet or a slinky dress with equal aplomb. What he saw in me was still a mystery. I tried to explain what was going on, managed only: “I hate Louisiana.”

  “I don’t blame you.” He leaned closer. “Are you having a panic attack?”

  I shook my head, then nodded, then shook it again.

  “Okay. Take a deep breath. I’m right here, I’m holding you. Let it out. Breathe in.”

  I imagined his arms around me, imagined lying together in the shitty little apartment we’d shared near Rutgers. It made me feel lonely, but it gave me something to think about besides the heat and the tattoo and my boss and the job that might be too weird for me to handle. The breathing helped. My head cleared further, and keeping the car on the right side of the road no longer seemed like an overwhelming prospect.

  “Thanks, that helps.” I wanted to show him the tattoo—but the thought made my mouth feel dry again. What if he demanded I quit my job and come to Chicago right away? Or worse, what if he couldn’t see it at all? Hallucination isn’t supposed to be a symptom of generalized anxiety disorder, but it was actually the most rational explanation I could think of. “What do you do when your job gets weird?” I asked him instead.

  He leaned back, obviously pleased to have been of use. “Research, mostly. Or diagnose my colleagues’ personality disorders on insufficient evidence, depending on the brand of weirdness. Is someone being nasty?”

  “No. Just, um, trying to figure out campus culture.”

  “Lots of alcohol and not enough drugs, probably.”

  We chatted a little longer, and then he had to get back to course prep. I let him go, and didn’t tell him I’d called in sick. Nothing bad happened on my drive home.

  Outside my apartment complex, I found the heat still intense, but now that I was calmer (and before I hit the barricade of smokers by the door) I took a moment to breathe. I can’t stand the way Louisiana looks or feels, but the smell is amazing. Silt and decay like endless autumn, overlain with orchids and citrus and cypress and a million other trees and vines and roots bursting from every available surface. I can’t face the swamp in person. Giant bugs to bite you or leap in your face, mud to slip on, alligators just lying around hoping you’re weak enough to be worth a sprint. But I love the smell.

  I drowned my sorrows in chocolate and a Criminal Minds marathon, and it helped. Sherise sent an email to say she hoped I’d feel better, and I stared at it for five minutes trying to figure out whether she believed me before giving up and going back to the TV.

  But calling out sick only works for so long, and I’ve learned the hard way that if I let myself do it two days in a row it’s easy to get inertia and stretch it for a week. So the next morning, lying in bed, I tried to put my thoughts in order.

  The tattoo remained, stubbornly, on my arm. It still felt tender, but the dim light filtering through the blinds showed that the swelling had gone down. So I would go with the assumption that I wasn’t hallucinating, if nothing else because I wasn’t checking into any hospital without David there to look respectable for the doctors.

  If the tattoo was real . . . then I still wasn’t sure about the statues. I’d been spiraling, and I couldn’t even trust my judgment of live people when that happened. How the hell was I supposed to predict allegorical virtues? But the tattoo, all by itself, meant I didn’t understand how books worked. Probably it meant I didn’t understand how the world worked at all, but I’d always known that. Books, though, I thought I had down.

  When his job got weird, David did research. For him that meant digging through sociology databases and endless stacks of journal articles. I didn’t know what database covered this situation—but if the library had untrustworthy books, it ought to have resources to tell you about them.

  “Imagine it’s someone else’s reference question,” I said aloud. Talking to myself feels stupid, but never speaking aloud at home feels a lot worse. “Miss, I’ve got a report about book attacks due in three hours. Can you find everything for me? Yes, damn straight I can.”

  Sherise nodded when I dropped my lunch in the staff room, and asked casually after my health. I told her I was fine today, tried to parse what she was thinking. Probably I ought to have gone ahead and asked about the book. But she hadn’t told me when she cleaned the tattoo, and maybe there was a reason for that. Either it wasn’t the sort of thing she could explain properly, or she assumed I already knew.

  One of David’s psych grad friends, a year ahead of him, figured out—halfway through his postdoc—that they’d hired him thinking he’d studied under a different professor from the same department. They’d never asked, he’d never told them, and he’d struggled to keep up the whole year. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could come out and say. Suppose one of the Rutgers library science professors was secretly a Predatory Books specialist? Or more plausibly, suppose Sherise assumed this was something Neopagans just knew about? Either way, I didn’t want to make her feel stupid—or like hiring me had been a mistake. I’d just have to paw through the databases myself until I found what I needed.

  Walking into the reading room was hard. My body believed, even if I wasn’t sure, that I’d faced a threat here. Bodies like to preserve themselves; mine wanted me to go back to my cave where it was safe. I told my body that it was stupid, and went in. I couldn’t help glancing at Determination. She didn’t seem about to spear me, but I still sensed something watching. The sense of attention seemed to pervade the room, all the allegories judging our choices of study. I shivered, tried to ignore what was probably just my neurotic imagination, and turned on the ancient reference computer.

  The library’s generous funder wasn’t nearly as fond of technology as of architecture or hard copy, so I had far too long to sit in the crossfire of allegorical gazes without the screen to distract me. When I finally got the browser running, I looked over the library’s scant list of databases. Medline? Likely to support the hallucination hypothesis. PsycInfo? Worse. Maybe JSTOR or the always over-general Academic Search Premier? Eventually I decided to start with databases I’d never heard of—if a community college with a lousy budget for online services subscribed to something really obscure, the
re was probably a reason.

  I found a few, in fact. Mostly the weird ones claimed space in world mythology and folklore, though there was one in biology and another in physics. MythINFO turned out to be perfectly pedestrian, though kind of awesome: it let you search by a drop-down menu of Stith Thompson Motif Index entries. Several looked relevant—various “transformation” archetypes, magical books—but turned up only articles on fairy tales, drowned in the deep jargon of literary analysis.

  PYTHIAS, though, seemed more promising. Various combinations of “book” and “tattoo,” suitably modified by “AND” one thing and “-” another, got me nowhere. But an exasperated “bibliogenic illness” turned up a long list of books in the Zs. I scribbled down call numbers for those available locally, took a deep breath, and fled the reading room for whatever lurked in the stacks.

  My first few days in the library, I could get lost by blinking. The stacks wound back in all directions, and I could never quite figure out how straight rows added up to a circular building—except that the rows seemed to curve subtly, sometimes, and the turns weren’t always right angles. Today for the first time, a map stretched out in my mind; I couldn’t see the edges, but could feel the shape and logic of how the rows spread from where I stood. Beneath my skin, the tattoo pulsed with soft heat. I touched it, gingerly, but felt nothing from outside.

  I hadn’t been back to the Zs—the “index” section whose self-referential topic is books and libraries—since the whirlwind tour during my interview. But the warmth in my arm seemed to increase along what I vaguely recalled was the right path. I gave in and followed it, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.

  The AC was managing better today, at least as far as temperature. The stacks felt cool and shadowy. But in the corner of my eye fog seeped from below the shelves, never there when I turned to look though I felt it against my skin. It sometimes seemed about to coalesce into more solid form and draw me to a particular shelf, a particular volume—but it never did.

  My map grew as I walked, and at last I saw that the stacks were not so much neat rows as a galactic spiral, linear only to the cursory glance. And at the far end of the western arm, I found an alcove lit by buzzing fluorescents and lined with tightly packed mahogany bookshelves. Tiny paperbacks pressed against oversized leather-bound tomes, and the half-imagined fog cleared in favor of archival dryness. A circular stained-glass window, wider than the span of my hands, filtered light through an abstract pattern of magenta and midnight blue. The colors shifted as shadows moved beyond—probably leaves from the grand row of hollies and live oaks between library and parking lot. My arm burned, pain flaring as I stepped into the coruscating illumination. I whimpered and bit my lip.

  I wanted to move away from the window and get my books. Instead, unwilled, I knelt. As in the reading room, I felt again the attention of some presence. This one seemed less judgmental, more curious. Not friendly curiosity: a biologist examining a noisy DNA sequence, perhaps, or me with a particularly recalcitrant new database. The attention sharpened, and I felt uncomfortably aware of my body: not only fat ass and weak ankles, but heart thudding and guts clenching and nerves struggling to keep up. All pus and blood and static, acid and slime and brittle bone.

  And I felt the examination grow more active, as whatever attended through the window started to prod at my flaws and cracks.

  The tattoo had been quick, done before I knew what was happening. Not so, here. This thing wanted to change me, though it clearly didn’t care about my opinion on the specifics—probably didn’t even consider that I might have one. I gasped, but still couldn’t rise from where it held me bent almost to the floor, stomach compressing uncomfortably and legs cramping and falling asleep. Worse, a part of me didn’t want to. I’ve never liked my body, not the ass and ankles and skin and face I deal with every day, and not the inside bits now suddenly forced into my awareness. Any change might be for the better—at the very least wouldn’t be anything I could be blamed for.

  But the part that knelt willingly was all conscious. A wave of revulsion and fear surged up to overwhelm any other reaction. My whole body shook and my pulse came so fast it hurt. In the throes of the panic attack, my instincts broke through whatever held me down, as they did everything that might have intent about it. I threw myself from the illuminated circle and scuttled backward until my back pressed against the nearest shelf. If the books wanted to bite me, I’d be ink all over.

  Slowly—no Sherise to interrupt my reactions, no David to talk me down—I started to think in words again. I stared at dust motes floating in the light from the window, made swirling nebulae by the colors. The light hadn’t moved while I curled frozen beside it. I’d lost track of time, but sunlight ought to have shifted across the floor. Maybe there was another room beyond this one, even if my unlikely map told me otherwise.

  If I got up and went closer, I might be able to glimpse whatever lay on window’s other side. That seemed like a bad idea.

  Maybe the books could tell me.

  I pulled myself to my feet, terrified every moment of toppling back into the light. My arm still ached with heat. In the panic’s aftermath I felt washed out emotionally, just numb enough to actually consider sticking around for what I’d come to get.

  The Nature of the Word was bound in calfskin, fine yellow-edged pages typeset save for hand-illuminated letters at the start of chapters. I winced at the yellowing; this ought to be in the rare book room, not the ordinary stacks. Palaces of History was library bound but looked like a reprint of something much earlier, each page imaged from a neatly handwritten monograph with intricate—if disturbing—illustrations. The simply-named Libris looked like a Penguin Classics paperback, except that it came from Sarkomand Translations, a publisher and imprint I’d never heard of.

  I found a library cart lurking in a back corner, odd reassurance that the alcove existed for other people too. Maybe they all knew to avoid the window, or maybe it liked them better. Or maybe I ought to report it—like telling someone when you spot a leaking pipe. I trundled the cart back toward the galactic core.

  I ducked my head at Determination and her companions as I settled at my desk. Powers want respect, Sherise had said, and until I knew what I was doing it was probably safer to give them at least a little. Epiphany’s gaze stood higher now, no longer focused on those of us below. I caught myself staring at her left hand, the one holding her robe. It wasn’t just a pose, I realized: she stood ready to bare her chest to Determination’s spear, and it was her opposite’s eye that she sought to attract.

  I shivered, and forced my attention back to the books. I started with The Nature of the Word: at any minute, I expected someone to come along and tell me it needed to go into protective storage until I could prove my need to touch its fragile pages. Selfish but not sociopathic, I did snag a pair of nitrile gloves from the check-out counter.

  Those who believe the universe was created, believe it was created with words. Those who know it for an accident still understand that language, once created, becomes a force in its own right. Fifteen million years before humanity’s birth, the Tay-yug claimed that miserly gods hid favored words in the hearts of stars, making them unstable and scouring life from worlds that spun too close.

  I sat back, breathing hard. It was a story, of course it was a story, a myth I’d never heard before. A myth of gamma ray bursts, in a book that looked older than the phenomenon’s discovery—but how much did I know about the history of physics? I ought to keep reading. Would, in a moment.

  When I was a kid, for a while I got really into urban legends. Even though I knew better, I’d sit up late reading about chupacabras and the Loch Ness monster. The one that really got to me was the mothman. It was sort of a humanoid with big bug wings, and people would look out their windows and it would just be hovering there, staring at them. That was it—it never broke the window or hurt anyone, at least not who reported it later. But I’d pull my shades down tight, eyes squeezed shut so that if a
nything was out there, I wouldn’t see it. Knowing that if I hadn’t read about it, if I hadn’t known it was out there to look for, the windows would have been perfectly safe.

  Of course I already knew, now, that there was something outside.

  I scanned, sampled, turning pages cautiously but skimming as quickly as I could, looking for what I needed—something that would explain what had happened to me. Instead, I learned about books that started plagues or imprisoned their readers, and others that, read in the right place and at the right time, would let you cast your mind out to travel the stars. Stories that could leave your mind a husk colonized by parasitic characters, single words that could rewrite memory.

  I did not slam the book shut. I closed it, carefully, like the rare archival volume that it was. I could not give up reading, wouldn’t blind myself to what it offered, just because there might be monsters inside.

  I hadn’t found anything about tattoos, or stained glass windows—maybe another book might be more relevant. You’ve got to focus when you’re doing research, can’t just let yourself get sucked in by whatever seems shiniest. And “terrifying” is a lot like “shiny.” Libris, with its two-tone paper cover, looked reassuringly pragmatic.

  “How did you get ahold of that?” Sherise’s voice, sharp and angry, froze me with my hand on the cover. My eyes shifted toward The Nature of the Word and I felt my cheeks grow hot. But it was Libris that she snatched from my desk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I found it in the Zs. I was trying to look up something about—” I pushed up my sleeve to show the galaxy tattoo. It was, I realized, the same shape as the stacks, the same colors as the window. And I’d just made my ignorance obvious, too. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.