I gather her bones and drop them into the grave. I toss aside the shovel and scoop the earth with my bare hands, feeling its texture, the bits of roots and tiny organisms. I strain to recall what little I knew of this woman to write a eulogy for her in my mind, and as I search my memory, I feel a sense of expansion. My mind is a small room lined with bookcases, but when I reach into the shelves, I find no wall behind them. My thoughts push through my skull into some deeper space beyond.
And then voices. A crowd.
We will show you.
My feet slip in the mud, and I fall into the grave.
-
THE SHALLOW HOLE has become bottomless, expanding all around me into a vast darkness. But somewhere out in that nothingness, slowly moving closer, I see light and motion. A stream of colorful rectangles rushing past me as I fall.
Books.
A wall of books, an expanse, extending in all directions until it disappears into the shadows. All my dreams and nightmares and teasing glimpses of mysteries—I feel them adding to a sum.
I know this place.
Outside the cramped garret of my mind, past my impoverished collection of self-help bestsellers, movie-adapted pulp, and barely-opened classics propped up by beer bottles, there is a Library. A place I have sensed but never seen. A place that is not a place but a reality beyond atoms. And somehow…I am there.
I am no longer falling. I am standing on a balcony at the base of a towering shelf. The balcony runs out of sight in both directions, lit in dim orange patches by unseen lights. Beyond the railing: a dark gulf, then another wall of books. I look up. Another balcony, and another above that, and on and on until they disappear into the golden glow of some impossibly lofty skylight. The level where I stand is utilitarian: metal shelves, tile floors, the dull municipal efficiency of a small-town branch, but the architecture grows more beautiful with each floor until its ornate intricacies become a blur in the hazy heights. The desire I feel to explore those shelves is an exquisite agony—but there is no way up.
Not for you, the voices say. Not yet.
Who are they? Which members of my ever-expanding inner ensemble are these? There was a time when I heard the murmurings of the minds I’d eaten, a room full of weary souls reminiscing on the past. I hear these now, but they have joined a much larger chorus.
“When?” I ask them. The sound hits the silence like a boulder in a still pool; cascades of reverberation rush through the space.
Not alone. You’ll need help to climb. But to fall…? A note of sarcasm emerges from the chorus, an individual overtone that’s strangely familiar. You do that pretty well on your own.
A ladder appears at my feet, leading down to whatever’s below.
I peer over the balcony and feel the worms wriggle in my belly, my chest, my groin, spreading numbness that’s almost welcome. Below is like above, but reversed. Level after level, an endless succession of shelves and balconies, growing cruder and uglier until they vanish from view in the shadows.
Go, the voices say, and I feel a nudge at my back. You need to see it.
“See what?”
That familiar overtone again, wryly amused, but warm. You’ll see.
I climb onto the ladder. It’s white and smooth, with organic contours—the ladder is made of bones. Not the dry, brittle remains I’m used to but supple and warm to the touch. The ladder is alive.
I descend.
It’s exactly like Julie’s dream. I can feel the books around me; I can read them without touching them; they jitter and dance in their shelves, pages fluttering open and spewing their words into my mind. But this is not the rich perfume Julie enjoyed. She was ascending toward those luminous heights; I am sinking to the basement. My perfume is dust and dried blood, wet fur and fear sweat.
“What am I looking for?” I ask the voices.
The plain metal balconies become crude plywood carpentry, then raw timber tied with rope, then stone ledges, then nothing. I pass level after level of inaccessible books, abandoned and forgotten but still here, moldering in the depths.
Nothing in particular, the voice replies.
I catch familiar faces in the swamp of words. Disjointed excerpts of lives I’ve known, but only the darkest passages down here, morbid cuttings tucked in amongst medieval prison records and lists of smallpox deaths.
I see a girl who looks like Tomsen watching her father shudder and cough, dying from some treatable disease while her screams for help disappear into radio static. I see M shoving a smaller kid’s face into the pavement and holding back tears while his brothers cheer. I see him pointing a gun at a family while his girlfriend takes their food. I see him sinking his teeth into a boy. I see Nora watching him sink his teeth into a boy. I see Nora wandering alone, freezing and starving. I see her holding a knife to her wrists every night, asking why not and scrambling for an answer. I see Julie’s wrists, the blood and then the bandages. I see her staring dead-eyed at her mother’s mock funeral, her father dropping the empty dress into the grave. I see her writing a list on a painter’s canvas of everyone she’s killed, mostly just descriptions since she rarely got their names—fat man with tattoo, bald man with scars, cute boy with knife—and I see her covering it over with blue and black paint.
I see her meeting me.
I see her watching her friends butchered all around her. I see her father’s gun pointed at her head, his eyes glassy and cold before a demon peels him apart.
I see the man she’d decided to trust revealing that he’s a demon too.
“Whatever it is you’re trying to show me,” I whisper into the gloom, “I don’t want to see it.”
I try to halt my descent but my numb legs continue on reflex, as if they never needed my input. I am a half-dissolved torso falling like a leaf.
“I don’t want to see it!” I scream up toward the skylight, just a tiny white spot now, but no one answers.
I see a boy who looks like my father touching the blood on his lip. My grandfather sneering down at him, shaking his head in disgust. My great-grandfather doing the same to a boy who looks like my grandfather. Wads of dusty parchment, sheafs of papyrus, clay tablets. They hum and shake, angry and insistent, vomiting their words into my mind: Learn the way of things. Do as was done.
I squeeze my eyes shut and grip my head in my hands. I can feel the worms hammering at the gates of my brain.
Are you seeing it, corpse?
My eyes snap open. The overtone has become the fundamental; the chorus has receded to a supportive hum for the unadorned voice of a single young man.
I choke on his name. “Perry?”
A feeling of warm water pools in my chest—a ghost is smiling. It’s good to be known, R.
My feet refuse to stop. I sink lower. To my surprise, there’s a bottom; I see it in that vague orange glow, a floor hidden beneath drifts of dust and scattered pages, but I don’t stop there. The ladder continues through a hatch in the floor, down into the basement.
You’re so much like I was, Perry says to me. So concerned with with your worth and your purpose, your very right to exist. Do you really think your bumbling human errors—no matter how colorful—disqualify you from life? Or even happiness? Look around you!