Not so glamorous or fancy, not exactly stellar pay, but I had stupid little skills that I could use here. In a pinch, I could use my stride or my arm length to help me figure out measurements, thirty three and a half and thirty-two and a half inches, respectively.
Mostly, I tended to eyeball things, and maybe that was a factor in what had kicked my instincts into motion in the first place, when the rooms had felt small, despite all evidence to the contrary.
From one outer wall to the next, the map said the house measured thirty-seven feet in length. My estimate put it at twenty-one feet in length.
I tried again, going in the other direction, and I got the same estimate. Houses were supposed to expand and contract with temperature and the like, but not that much.
To experiment, I crossed the hallway and tried once more.
One hallway, with right angles at each corner, twenty-one feet in length down the north side, thirty-seven down the south side. The ends were each an equal six feet across.
I narrowed my eyes, looking down the length of the hallway. There was no distortion in the floorboards, and every bookshelf on one side somehow had a bookshelf opposite, of matching dimensions.
I began moving books aside on the shelves down the ‘short’ hallway.
It took me two tries to find the keyhole. Tucked in the corner just beneath one shelf, at bellybutton level.
The key required a fair bit of effort to turn, and rewarded me with an audible, heavy click.
The bookcase swung inward. Oversized hinges managed the heavy burden as it swung all the way around and sat flush against the wall.
“Fuck me,” I muttered.
The room was a study. A library. There were two parts to the room, suggesting it took up two floors in the house. The upper half was a ring, looking down through an opening, bordered with bookcases on the four exterior walls, with a wrought iron railing keeping people from falling through the hole in the middle. Soft, mottled light shone down from a dust-caked window in the ceiling, lighting both halves of the library better than lightbulbs lit the rest of the house.
I slowly circled around, taking it in. Each wall had ornate stepladders on wheels, which could coast along rails that had been inset in floor and ceiling. Another stepladder led from a gap in the railing on the far end to the floor below.
I looked at the books, noting the differences from the ones in the rest of the house. They were better taken care of, for one thing, and they tended to be narrow.
Cassandra’s Gaze.
Deleterious Craftings
Draoidh. The book had a little ivory mask inset in the spine, with round staring eyes and a very curly beard.
Glamour.
Poppets.
Shamanism: ‘Animus’, volumes one through six, and Shamanism: ‘Umbra’, volumes seven through ten.
Vestige: Glimmers and Gasps.
Wū zhěn: Eastern Vodun Practices.
I finished reading spines along the one wall. I traced spines with my fingertips as I passed on to the next wall.
Blessed Wrongs.
Dryads, Varieties.
Jokes from the Faerie Folk.
Lilith’s Children.
Maddening Things.
Observations on Bacchae interacting in Modern Society.
On Others. Editions from 1964 through 2012 were lined up on the shelf. Thicker texts.
Pitiable: Transcriptions from informal dialogues with Vampir.
The next shelf seemed to be a continuation from O to Z, in the same theme. The bookshelf adjacent to that one seemed to be in a variety of different languages. French, German, and a language with characters formed out of triangles.
The barrier to understanding was a reason to stop, where I might have kept walking and reading indefinitely.
Here, in this library, were the explanations and the rules. It was, theoretically, a way to make it all make sense. Except there was so much here, I couldn’t begin to take it in. Where did I even start, when it came to trying to look up bird-skull undead things? I’d gone from having no answers to having too many.
I felt a little cold, despite the general warmth of the room. I rubbed my hands against my sleeves.
Feeling restless, I reached the ladder that led down to the first floor and climbed down.
A desk and chair, a cozy armchair, a leather psychiatrist’s couch, a book stand with a book on it, and cabinets. There were more bookshelves, but many were smaller, squat, set on top or beneath the cabinets. More private, with personal books. A blackboard on wheels that could be flipped over to write on either side.
A blanket was thrown over one piece of furniture. I had any number of reasons not to touch it, but there was a shape to it, tall, narrow, and flatter than the blackboard. I could see the metal feet…
I walked around to the side, then lifted up a corner of the blanket, where it wasn’t facing me.
Because in this fucked up situation, with all this, I wasn’t going to trust anything.
“Rose?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Sense anything funny?”
“No. Except for light appearing from nowhere.”
“Covered mirror,” I said, as I threw off the blanket.
I sat back while I watched her take it all in. In the frame of the mirror, she turned and walked over to a bookcase, picking up a book.
No effect on my end, I noted.
I turned my attention to the desk. The wood had brown leather inlaid into it with big brass buttons. I saw pens and inkwells, regular pens, pencils, a calculator, a brush and scalpel and other tools in jars and cases in the corners. A mug held what might have been tea or coffee, though it had sat for long enough that the milk had congealed into a cloud of white on the surface. There were books and papers, too.
The papers included one pile of legal documents, virtually identical to the ones I’d left downstairs, only they were addressed to Molly, with some changes in wording here and there.
What caught my eye, however, was the letter.
“Rose,” I said.
“What?”
I grabbed the pages of the letter, then walked around until we could see each other. I stood by the mirror, holding it up so we could both read it.
Molly et al,
Please accept my graceless apology. At this juncture, you’ll likely be frightened and confused. Chances are good you’ll see outside parties at work, if you haven’t already, helping you to conclude that this isn’t nonsense. That helps us move on to business. If you find yourself here and are already injured in body, mind, heart, spirit or other more esoteric departments, you may need to jump straight to instruction number one in the list below, sacrifice sleep to see it through, and then move on to a great deal of research. The Index is a catalogue of all things found in my library, which I penned myself, and will help direct you to solutions to whatever ails you.
I could explain, justify, and make excuses, but that is very much not my manner or style. You have a library of explanations sitting around you. With study, perhaps, you’ll see how I justified what I did. We can do without the excuses entirely.