I didn’t know those guys. Or any guys. My wrists were bleeding from fighting with the zipties, you can’t break a ziptie, this I knew but still.
“If you need me,” he whispered into the cracks in the bookpile, “I will be downstairs. In Reference.” And he laughed like a maniac, which he actually was. I could hear his feet go down the metal stairs. “No!” I yelled. “I love books! Books! BOOKS!”
Nothing. No sound. Probs I gave another scream. I don’t actually remember. In a Library no one can hear you scream.
How long was I in there, behind the books? A day? Days? I blacked out, then came back, and there were books. I believe I peed my pants. When I was alert I could only see books; also when I was passed out. Once I thought I’d got free and was reading one, but that wasn’t factual. It seemed all the time that the books were actually coming closer to me, like pressing in, the stacks squirmishing forward to crush me. He came back once. I heard his feet. I thought he’d had a change of heart. I sort of moaned-pleaded, I could hardly speak; he nosed around like some rat sniffing for what he could get.
“Help,” I whispered. “Oh help.” Then I wandered away again into nowheres and when I came to he was gone again.
I was done for. Like Kyra and Ira. I could see them in my mind, skeletons hung up with zipties like corpse pirates, behind their books. I was just in the act of passing out again, for good this time, the books smothering me in revenge — and at that exact second I heard footsteps, foot-dings, on the stairs, not one person’s but two or three’s, coming up from below. Then came this wild kungfu yell and the books were pushed away, this side, that side, and a little light came in. An outstretched hand caught my arm.
It was the hand of Seymour Chin. The Singaporean had reached New Haven. The Library was in the hands of its enemies.
What I remember after that is not much. Seymour Chin looking at me like his face was going to pop — I’d never seen the man in the body. Behind him this very large diversity person in body armor, Yale blue, their hand on their gun, looking like they’d seen a well you know.
Then I fainted.
So what it was that happened, which I learned later in the Yale hospital where they checked me out: Seymour’d followed a thumbnail microtag we worked on freshman year — our first proj! I installed it on myself way then and forgot! Amazing he could trace his way up through the stacks, but that was what the tag was supposed to do, and damn it did.
Seymour explained about the rumors. Hadn’t I heard them? The Old Campus Vampire. No I hadn’t. Heyjoe, everybody tells them for giggles, just. But some people really had disappeared over the years, maybe just wandering in the empty buildings or like looter-ish. Never found. Seymour was very into stories like that in gaming and such. But not kidding? Not one kid, he said. The Library Ghoul. The Book Fiend. We had to laugh, but it wasn’t actually funny. Because it wasn’t just Kyra and Ira. It was others. They’re still looking.
“Heyjoe,” he said to me when we’d left the hospital and got out from around the media collected there. “Still time. Let’s go to the College, get a beer. Wet T contest! So I heard. Rock out!”
Seymour too loves old things.
“Not for me, Seymour, sorry to say.” I checked my watch, saw messages and-cetera. Relief. “Love you, heyjoe, but you know what?” I said. “Spring Break’s over. I need to get back to the real world.”
Then I see it’s the Library Fiend. Like looking at me out of my watch. Startled, very. Then I see it’s like Foxnews, it’s his what, arraignment? In this dim New Haven courtroom. He seemed so small. When the public defender person said something about a psych-eval he piped right up, and his weird eyes started revolving. “True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” He tried to get to his feet but a cop shoved him back. “The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”
Well fuck yes you are, heyjoe.
“Poe,” I said. “I bet.”
“Hmmever,” Seymour said. He was guiding me along the street through the crowd. They were going in and out of the tech stores and the clothes and shoes and such. But not into one store, on a corner, that seemed closed. We got closer and it looked closeder. But it wasn’t. There were lights on inside, and on the window was written BOOKS.
I stopped.
“I wonder,” I said. “Poe.”
“Oh no, heyjoe. Step away from the door.”
“Just books, Seymour.”
“Heyjoe,” he said, tugging. “You can’t be too careful.”
Silhouettes
by Chandra Prasad
Wooster Square
“It’s not the same one.”
The shopkeeper tried to hide his disappointment and annoyance. He was clutching a copy of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. It was a small miracle that he had the book at all. “Look — good shape,” he insisted, gesturing to the gold-embossed cover. He flipped through the pages, revealing mostly crisp, stainless paper.
“It’s not the one I used to have,” the customer, a young man, replied. “Mine had a sphinx — with wings — on the cover.”
The shopkeeper shook his head, struggling to understand. Nearly everyone who entered his shop spoke Italian, usually infused with the southern cadence of Amalfi and Atrani. It was disconcerting to encounter a person like this, someone with no trace of the old country.
“I give you discount...” the shopkeeper said, beginning to despair. It had been terribly slow all week at his store, which mainly sold dry goods. Maybe he should shutter the little alcove of English and Italian books he kept in the back. He could use the additional space to sell fresh bread and his wife’s homemade salami. Books were an indulgence few could afford these days.
“I don’t want it. But would you keep an eye out for the one I do want? The one with the sphinx?”
The shopkeeper nodded, although he didn’t quite understand. He didn’t like this customer, who spoke tersely, without warmth or congeniality. Still, business was business. He would try to find another copy. One with a different cover. That much he understood. “Come back in a week,” he called out as the young man left, the bells jingling on the door behind him.
The man walked slowly down Court Street. He took off his brimmed hat, trying not to perspire on what promised to be another scorching day. He was conscious of his limp, although it was subtle now, not the problem it had been when he was a child. But he was sure people noticed it: the contrast between his youthful appearance and elderly hobble.
He passed several men — metal nails in their mouths, hammers in their hands — boarding up yet another building. The economy had soured since the crash and factories around Wooster Square were folding like poker hands. Without work, people were running out of money. The row houses along the street, once grand and stately, showed a hundred signs of neglect: chipped paint, sagging porches, missing shutters, sunken roofs. Fifty years ago they’d been opulent single-family homes for the rich; now they were overcrowded rooming houses for the broke.
Still, the young man saw signs of resilience and self-sufficiency too. He passed household vegetable gardens and chicken coops. He passed bakeries, meat markets, and pastry shops still holding on. The unemployed were turning their houses into makeshift shops, leaving their windows open so that the delicious smells of their cooking would lure passersby. More than once, the man had stopped impulsively to buy tomato pies or rich, sweet pastiera. If his mother were still alive, she would be shocked. Her Irish son eating Italian food.