Together, with Neel reading the instructions from my laptop and Penumbra handing me the pieces, we assemble the GrumbleGear 3000 for the first time. The components are cut from corrugated cardboard and they make a satisfying thwack when you thump them with your finger. Slotted together, they achieve a preternatural structural integrity. There’s an angled bed for a book and two long arms above it, each with a cunning socket for a camera — one for each page in a two-page spread. The cameras connect to my laptop, which is now running a program called GrumbleScan. The program, in turn, hands the images off to a hard drive, a matte-black terabyte tucked into a slender box of Bicycle playing cards. The box is a nice roguish touch from Neel.
“Who designed this thing again?” he asks, scrolling through the instructions.
“A guy named Grumble. He’s a genius.”
“I should hire him,” Neel says. “Good programmer. Great sense of spatial relationships.”
I open my Guide to Central Park Birds and set it up on the scanner. Grumble’s design isn’t much like Google’s — it has no spidery page-turning appendages, so you have to do that part yourself, and trigger the cameras, too — but it works. Flip, flash, snap. The migratory pattern of the American robin spools onto the disguised hard drive. Then I break the scanner back down into flat pieces with Kat keeping time. It takes forty-one seconds.
With this contraption in tow, I’ll return to the Reading Room just a little past midnight tonight. I’ll have the place entirely to myself. With maximum speed and stealth, I will scan not one but two books, then flee the scene. Deckle has warned me to be done and departed, leaving no trace, by first light.
THE BLACK HOLE
IT’S JUST PAST MIDNIGHT. I walk quickly up Fifth Avenue, eyeing the dark mass of Central Park across the street. The trees are black silhouettes against a blotchy gray-purple sky. Yellow taxis are the only cars on the street, despondently circling for fares. One of them flashes its brights at me; I shake my head no.
Deckle’s key goes click in the dark doorway of the Festina Lente Company, and just like that, I am inside.
There’s a dot of light blinking red in the darkness, and thanks to Deckle’s intel, I know it’s a silent alarm that signals a very private security firm. My heart beats faster. Now I have thirty-one seconds to enter the code, which I do: 1-5-1-5. That’s the year Aldus Manutius died — or, if you subscribe to the stories of the Unbroken Spine: the year he didn’t.
The front room is dark. I pull a headlamp out of my bag and wind the strap around my forehead. It was Kat who suggested a headlamp instead of a flashlight. “So you can focus on flipping the pages,” she said. The light flashes across the FLC on the wall, casting sharp shadows behind the capitals. I briefly consider some extracurricular espionage here — could I delete their database of e-book pirates? — but decide my real mission is risky enough.
I stalk through the silent expanse of the outer office, sweeping the headlamp through cubicles on either side. The refrigerator rattles and hums; the multipurpose printer blinks forlornly; screen savers twist across monitors, casting weak blue light into the room. Otherwise, nothing moves or makes a sound.
In Deckle’s office, I skip the costume change and keep my phone securely in my pocket. I give the shelves a gentle push, and I’m surprised at how easily they split and swivel back, silent and weightless. This secret way is well oiled indeed.
Beyond, it is all blackness.
Suddenly this seems like a very different undertaking. Up until this moment, I’d still been imagining the Reading Room as it was yesterday afternoon: bright, bustling, and if not welcoming then at least well lit. Now I am basically looking into a black hole. This is a cosmic entity from which no matter or energy have ever escaped, and I am about to step straight into it.
I tilt my headlamp down. This is going to take a while.
I should have asked Deckle about the light switch. Why didn’t I ask Deckle about the light switch?
My footfalls make long echoes. I’ve stepped through the passageway into the Reading Room, and it is pure pitch-black, the blackest void I have ever encountered. It’s also freezing.
I take a step forward and decide to keep my head down, not up, because when I look down, the headlamp’s light reflects on smooth rock, and when I look up, it disappears into nothing.
I want to scan these books and get out of this place. First I need to find one of the tables. There are dozens. This isn’t going to be a problem.
I start by tracing the chamber’s perimeter, trailing my fingers along the shelves, feeling the bumps of the spines as I go. My other arm is outstretched and sensing, like a mouse’s whisker.
I hope there aren’t mice in here.
There. My headlamp catches a table edge, and then I see a heavy black chain and the book that it binds. The cover bears tall silver letters that reflect brightly back at me: MANVTIVS.
From my messenger bag, I produce first my laptop and then the dismantled skeleton of the GrumbleGear. The assembly process is more difficult in the darkness, and I fumble with the slots and tabs for too long, afraid I’ll break the cardboard. The cameras come out of my bag next, and I give one of them a test snap. The flash explodes and lights up the whole chamber for a bright microsecond and immediately I regret it, because my vision is ruined, swimming with wide purple spots. I blink and wait and wonder about the mice and/or bats and/or minotaur.
MANVTIVS is truly gigantic. Even if it wasn’t chained to the table, I don’t know how somebody would get one of these books out of here. I have to wrap both arms around it in an awkward embrace to haul it up onto the scanner. I’m afraid the cardboard won’t bear the load, but physics is on my side tonight. Grumble’s design holds strong.
So I start scanning. Flip, flash, snap. The book is just like all the rest I’ve seen in the Waybacklist: a dense matrix of coded characters. Flip, flash, snap. The second page is the same as the first, and so is the third, and the seventh. I fall into a trance, turning the wide monotonous pages and taking their measure. Flip, flash, snap. The grim letters of MANVTIVS are all that exist in the universe; in between camera flashes, I see only flat buzzing darkness. I feel with my fingers to find the next page.
There’s a shake. Is someone down here? Something just made the table shake.
It shakes again. I try to say Who’s there? but it catches in my throat, which is parched, and I make a little croak instead.
Another shake. Then, before I have time to formulate a terrifying theory about the Horned Guardian of the Reading Room — obviously Edgar Deckle’s werebeast form — there’s more shaking, and the cave rumbles and roars and I have to clutch the scanner to keep it upright. In a flood of relief, I realize it’s the subway, just the subway, cruising through bedrock next door. The noise echoes back into itself and becomes a low bellow in the darkness of the cave. Finally, it passes, and I start scanning again.
Flip, flash, snap.
Many minutes pass, or maybe more than minutes, and bleakness washes over me. Maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t have any dinner, so my blood sugar is bottoming out, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m standing alone in a freezing pitch-black subterranean vault. But whatever the cause, the effect is reaclass="underline" I feel keenly the stupidity of this entire enterprise, this absurd cult. Book of life? This is barely a book at all. The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III is a better book than this.
Flip, flash, snap.
But of course: I can’t read it. Would I say the same thing about a book in Chinese or Korean or Hebrew? The big Torahs in Jewish temples look like this, right? Flip, flash, snap — heavy grids of inscrutable symbols. Maybe it’s my own limitation that’s getting to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t understand what I’m scanning. Flip, flash, snap. What if I could read this? What if I could glance across the page and, you know, get the joke? Or gasp at the cliff-hanger?