By midday, she was feeling so disillusioned about it that when Thom declared almost an hour early that it was lunchtime, she didn’t even bother to argue.
Seated across from each other at the wooden table in the otherwise empty kitchen, they ate their soup and bread and drank their milk in silence.
Finally, Thom said, “You’re not still mad at me for yesterday, are you?”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. Yesterday? Had he done something?
“When I told you I didn’t want you going back into the Stacks by yourself?” he added helpfully.
“Oh, that!” she declared, remembering now. “No, I’m not mad about that. I wasn’t mad then, either. I just wanted to have a look at what was back there because I thought I heard something.” She shook her head in disgust. “But I think I must have imagined it.”
He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “What do you think you heard, Ellice?”
His face was so serious, his eyes fixed on her as if she might reveal mysteries about which he could only wonder, that she grinned despite herself. “Actually, I thought I heard someone calling.”
He didn’t laugh at her, didn’t crack a smile, didn’t change expression at all. “Did the voice say, ‘Help me’?”
Her eyes widened, and she reached impulsively for his hand. “You heard it, too?”
He nodded slowly, his shock of dark hair falling down over his eyes. He brushed it away in that familiar gesture. A lot about him was getting familiar to her by now. “I heard it. But not yesterday when you did. I heard it a few weeks ago, before you came.”
She leaned forward eagerly, lowering her voice. “Did you go back into the Stacks to see if someone was there?”
“I did. That was when I found myself in the trouble I warned you about yesterday. We were supposed to talk about it last night, but you forgot. I think you were still wondering about the voice when you left me. Am I right?”
She nodded quickly. “I thought about it all night. And I did forget to ask you what happened. Will you tell me now?”
He leaned close as well, taking a careful look about the kitchen. “Two weeks ago, around midday, I heard the voice. Not for the first time, you understand. I’d heard it before, very faint, very far away. I was always alone, working on cataloging the books. I’d made myself believe I was hearing things. But this time, I couldn’t ignore it. I went back into the darkest corners of the Stacks when everyone else was eating lunch or off doing something.” He had dropped his own voice to a whisper to match hers. “I have good eyesight, so I didn’t take any kind of light that might give me away to Pinch. You know how he’s always lurking around. Anyway, I had heard the voice very clearly this time. It was saying the same thing, over and over. ‘Help me! Help me!’ You can imagine how I felt, hearing it pleading like that. I decided to try to track it down.”
He paused, glancing left and right once more. “There were Throg Monkeys back there, dozens of them. But they weren’t paying any attention to me. They were carrying books, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Some of them glanced my way before disappearing back into the shelving. One or two hissed at me. But they do that all the time, and I keep them under control with the whistle. So they let me pass without trying to stop me. It got darker and more shadowy as I went, and everything seemed to lose shape. Like it was all underwater, except it wasn’t, of course. But the Stacks seemed to ripple and shimmer as if they were.”
“Did you hear the voice while you were back there?” she interrupted.
He shook his head. “Not once. I listened for it, but didn’t hear anything. The farther back I went, the deeper the Stacks seemed to go. I couldn’t find the end. I don’t mind telling you that it gave me the shivers. But I kept going anyway. I thought I was being silly feeling scared like that. After all, I hadn’t been attacked or anything. Nothing had threatened me.”
He took a deep breath. “But then something happened. Something grabbed at me. Not like a hand or anything. More like a suction of some kind, pulling at me with tremendous force. It happened all at once, and I lost my footing and fell down. I was being dragged along the floor toward this darkness that looked like a huge tunnel. I started screaming, but it didn’t help. I managed to catch hold of one of the legs of the shelving and pull myself up against it. I clung to it with everything I had. Finally, I was able to pull myself back along the shelves until I was out of its grip. It took a long time, and no one came to help me. Which was probably a good thing, because if I’d been caught snooping I don’t think I would still be here and I wouldn’t have met you.”
Mistaya rested her chin in her hands. “So you never did find out about the voice? Or any of the rest of it?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. And I didn’t hear it again, either. I kept thinking I would, but I didn’t. So I ended up doing what you did. I convinced myself I was mistaken. I knew I wasn’t supposed to go back into the Stacks in the first place—His Eminence and Pinch had made that pretty clear. I just chalked the whole thing up to not doing what I had been told and almost paying the penalty for my disobedience. Not that I didn’t wonder; I just didn’t know what I should do.”
“So what do you think we should do now?” she asked him. “Now that I’ve heard the voice, too. Now that we know something is back there.” She watched his face as she said it, curious to measure his response. “Shouldn’t we do something?”
He gave her a momentary look of disbelief, and then he grinned. “Of course we should do something. But we have to do it together, and we have to be very careful.”
“We should have a better chance if there are two of us,” she declared excitedly. “We can protect each other.”
“We’d better go in at night, when everyone is asleep. Maybe whatever is back there will be sleeping, too.”
She nodded eagerly. “When do we go?”
“Soon as possible, I guess. Tonight?”
She grabbed his hand impulsively and squeezed it. “I like you, Thom of Libiris! I like you a lot!”
To his credit, he blushed bright red and looked immensely pleased.
They spent the afternoon planning their nighttime excursion, talking about it in low voices as they worked on the cataloging of the books, aware that Rufus Pinch was never far away and always listening. They decided they would go in around midnight, when everyone should be sleeping and no one would be working in the Stacks. They would take glow sticks to give them light, since the shelf torches were always extinguished at night, and they would make their way back into the shadowy recesses of the cavernous room until they found its end. If they were lucky, they would hear the voice while they were doing so. If not, they might at least find the back wall and see what was there.
Several times, as their conversation drifted on to other subjects, Thom remarked again that some of the books from the library seemed to be missing. It was impossible to tell which ones because all he had been given to work with by His Eminence was a list of catalog numbers. The only way he could even tell that books were missing was because he couldn’t find a match for some of the numbers on the list, and occasionally he noticed gaps in the books on the shelves.
“Why don’t they give you the titles instead of just the numbers?” Mistaya asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. His Eminence said I didn’t need the titles, only the numbers. Maybe he was trying to save on ink.”
“Did you tell him that there were books missing?”
“I told him. He said that maybe they weren’t really missing, that they were just misplaced. But finding any of them would have meant searching the whole of the Stacks, and I don’t have that sort of time. I try to keep an eye out for them, but I haven’t found any yet.”