There were no parks and no trees. There weren’t any cars or people. In fact, I wasn’t looking at a city at all. This vast construction was one single building: a massive cathedral, a massive museum, a massive… something. It was a mishmash of styles, some parts must have been added hundreds or even thousands of years after others – but it was all locked together. It was one. I couldn’t work out where the centre was. I couldn’t see where it had originally begun. Nor could I imagine how it had come into being. It was as if someone had taken a single seed – one brick – and dropped it into a bubbling swamp. And this, after thousands of years of growth, was the result.
Leaving the platform behind me, I walked down the other side of the hill and made my way towards the outer wall. I was now following a road with a marble-like surface and it was taking me directly towards a great big arch and, on the other side of it, an open door. The air was very still. I could actually hear my heart beating as I approached. I didn’t think I was in danger, but there was something so weird about this place, so far removed from my experience, that I admit I was afraid. I didn’t hesitate though. I passed through the arch and suddenly I was inside, in a long corridor with a tiled, very polished floor and a high, vaulted ceiling held up by stone pillars: not quite a church, not quite a museum, but something similar to both.
“Can I help you?”
Another shock. I wasn’t on my own. And the question was so normal, so polite that it just didn’t seem to belong to this extraordinary place.
There was a man standing behind a lectern, the sort of things lecturers have in front of them when they talk. He was quite small, a couple of inches shorter than me, and he had one of those faces… I won’t say it was carved out of stone (it was too warm and human for that) but it somehow seemed ages old, gnarled by time and experience.
From the look of him, I would have said he was an Arab, a desert tribesman, but without any of the trappings such as a headdress, white robes or a dagger. Instead, he was dressed in a long, silk jacket – faded mauve and silver – with a large pocket on each side and baggy, white trousers. A beard would have suited him but he didn’t have one. His hair was steel grey. His eyes were the same colour. They were regarding me with polite amusement.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This place?” The man seemed surprised that I had asked. “This is the great library. And it’s very good to see you again.”
A library. I remembered something Jamie had told me. When he met Scarlett at Scathack Hill, she had mentioned visiting a library to him .
“We’ve never met.”
“I think we have.” The man smiled at me. I wasn’t sure what language he was speaking. In the dreamworld, all languages are one and the same and people can understand each other no matter where they’ve come from. “You’re Matthew Freeman. At least, that’s the name you call yourself. You’re one of the Gatekeepers. The first of them, in fact.”
“Do you have a name?”
“No. I’m just the Librarian.”
“I’m looking for Scarlett,” I said. “Scarlett Adams. Has she been here?”
“Scarlett Adams? Scarlett Adams? You mean… Scar! Yes, she most certainly has been here. But not for a long time. And she’s not here now.”
“Do you know where I can find her?”
“I’m afraid not.”
We were walking down the corridor together, which was strange because I couldn’t remember starting. And we had passed into a second room, part of the library… it was obvious now. I had never seen so many books. There were books on both sides of me, standing like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, packed into wooden shelves that stretched on and on into the distance, finally – a trick of perspective – seeming to come together at a point. The shelves began at floor level and rose all the way to the ceiling, maybe a hundred rows in each block. The air was dry and smelled of paper. There must have been a million books in this room alone and each one of them was as thick as an encyclopaedia.
“You must like reading,” I said.
“I never have time to read the books. I’m too busy looking after them.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Just me.”
“Who built the library?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Matt. It was already here before I arrived.”
“So what are these books? Do you have a crime section? And romance?”
“No, Matt.” The Librarian smiled at the thought. “Although you will find plenty of crime, and plenty of romance for that matter, among their pages. But all the books in the library are biographies.”
“Who of?”
“Of all the people who have ever lived and quite a few who are still to be born. We keep their entire lives here. Their beginnings, their marriages, their good days and their bad days, their deaths – of course. Everything they ever did.”
We stopped in front of a door. There was a sign on it, delicately carved into the wood. A five-pointed star.
“I know this,” I said.
“Of course you do.”
“Where does this door go?”
“It goes anywhere you want it to.”
“It’s like the door at St Meredith’s!” I said.
“It works the same way… but there you have only twenty-four possible destinations. In your world, there are twenty-five doors, all connecting with each other – although none of them will bring you back here. This library, on the other hand, has a door in every room and I have absolutely no idea how many rooms there are and wouldn’t even know how to count them.”
The Librarian gestured with one hand. “After you.”
“Where are we going?”
“Well, since you’re here, why don’t we have a look at your life? Aren’t you curious?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s see…”
We went through the door and for all I knew at that moment we crossed twenty miles to the other side of the city. We found ourselves in a chamber that was certainly very different from the one we had left, with plate-glass windows all around us, held in place by a lattice-work of steel supports. Maybe this was one of the airport terminals I had seen. The books here were on metal shelves, each one with a narrow walkway and a circular platform that moved up and down like a lift but with no cables, no pistons, no obvious means of support.
We went up six levels and shuffled along the ledge with a railing on one side, the books on the other.
“Matt Freeman… Matt Freeman…” The Librarian muttered my name as we went.
“Are they in alphabetical order?” I asked. All the volumes looked the same except that some were thicker than others. I couldn’t see any names or titles.
“No. It’s more complicated than that.”
I looked back at the door that we’d come through. It was now below and behind us. “How do the doors work?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“How do you know where they’ll take you?”
He stopped and turned to look at me. “If you just wander through them, they’ll take you anywhere,” he said. “But if you know exactly where you want to go, that’s where they’ll take you.”
“Can anyone use them?”
“The doors in your world were built just for the five of you.”
“What about Richard?”
“You can each take a companion with you, if you’re so minded. Just remember to decide where you’re going before you step through or you could end up scattered all over the planet.”
We continued on our way but after another couple of minutes, the Librarian suddenly stopped, reached up and took out a book. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you.”