Once upon a time, it was said, Jasper Trant saw something nasty in the woodshed. The people who strayed into the Bequest between nine and five had often gathered as much from odd sources—a footnote in Aleister Crowley, a sidelong reference in (of all places) H.P. Lovecraft. They came hoping for secret words of power, the poor fossils. Modern spells are written in bright new esoteric languages like C++ and 80486 extended assembler. This was the glamour I’d cast over the real-time monitoring system that logged all movement in Area B.
“It’s like something out of fucking Alien,” Keith Ramsey had said the day before. “All those narrow twisty corridors… it’s designed to make you expect something’s going to jump out at you from round the next corner, or chase you through the bits where you can’t run because you’ve got to go sideways.”
Naturally I’d been thinking about it, too, and had replied: “My guess is, it was designed that way to make it hard to bring in heavy cutting equipment. Or a trolly big enough to truck out the library. Assuming there really is a library.”
“Mmm… or maybe it was just fun to design. Everyone likes mazes, and why not old Trant? He was a maths don, wasn’t he? You know there’s a general algorithm for solving any maze. No, not just “follow the left-hand wall,” that only works without unconnected internal loops. To find the center as well as getting out again, what you do is…”
I was fascinated, but Area B isn’t quite that complex. It fills almost all the building, winding up, down and around to pass every one of the (barred) windows, and completely enclosing the central volume in its web of stone and iron. You might get lost for a while, but there are no actual dead ends, or only one.
“You wouldn’t get planning permission for that nowadays,” Keith had said gloomily. “Bloody indoor folly.”
I moved along the eighteen-inch passageways now. The dull yellow lamps, too feeble and too widely spaced, bred a writhing mass of shadows. (When the gas-brackets were in use, it must have been far worse.) Our desultory patrols were set to cover the whole labyrinth, with one exception: the short spur where the sensors clustered thickest. Daily at 10 AM the gray-headed Trustee and his two hulking minders went down this forbidden path to—consult? check? dust? pay homage to? “Feed the Bequest,” came Keith’s remembered voice, now artificially hollow. “His expensive leather briefcase, Bob, simply has to be packed with slabs of raw meat. Flesh which is… no longer of any human shape!”
Remembering the photograph of a certain ex-guard, it was possible to feel apprehension. I thought also of my reconnaissance down at the Welsh Pony pub off Gloucester Green, where it was almost a standing joke that people didn’t wear a Trant guard’s navy uniform for long. They did not all suffer freak accidents: that would be absurd. By and large, they merely tended to leave after that average six weeks. You could speculate, if you chose, that something had frightened them. The heavy, regulation torch was a comfort in my hand.
Somewhere the real-time watchdog system dreamed its dreams, fed a soothingly “normal” pattern of patrol movements by my rogue software, registering nothing at all in the dense minefield of IR and ultrasonic pickups that guarded the way to Area C.
Left, right, left, and there in torchlight was the door: big, grim, banded with iron, deep-set in its massive frame, with a lock the size of a VCR unit. I was half inclined to turn back at that point, because it was joke. Modern burglars flip open those jumbo Victorian lever-and-ward efforts almost without breaking step. As part of my personal quest, I’d entered other restricted libraries (including sections of the BM and Bodleian known to very few) and had never seen such a lumbering apology for a lock. But after all, and hearteningly, there was the maze and the electronic network… something here was surely worth guarding.
“How shall one catch the lions in the desert?” I quoted to myself as I felt for the lock-spring, remembering one of Keith’s sillier answers: the hunter builds a cage, locks himself securely in, and performs an inversion transformation so that he is considered to be outside while all the lions are inside, along with the desert, the Earth, the universe… Perhaps Jasper Trant had liked mathematical jokes. He was here at just about the right time to have known Lewis Carroll, another of Keith’s heroes whom I must look up some day.
I was here because of a rumor that Trant’s preoccupations, Trant’s bequest, had a personal connection with—well—myself.
Click and click again. The door swung ponderously inward, and the first torchlit glimpse swept away half my uncertainties. Area C, where the movement sensors did not extend, was indeed a library—a forty-foot-square room with wooden bookcases scattered along its iron walls. Ceiling and floor were likewise made of, or lined with, dull iron. A vault.
All this profusion was a disappointment. I had flicked through libraries before. The literature of the occult is stupendously boring and repetitive… it may contain many small secrets, but I had very much hoped that dead Jasper Trant knew one big secret.
Must smells: old books, old iron, and a thin reek of what might have been oil. Keeping close to the wall, I moved cautiously clockwise to the first bookcase. An average turnover time of six weeks. Easing out a random volume with a cracked calf spine, I shone the torch on its title page to find what blasting, forbidden knowledge…
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy by William Paley, D.D.: The Twelfth Edition, corrected by The Author. Vol I. MDCCXCIX. Crammed with edifying stuff about Christianity.
Jesus Christ.
The next one was called The Abominations of Modern Society. These included swearing, “leprous newspapers” and “the dissipations of the ballroom,” and the author didn’t approve of them at all. Then another volume I of Paley… sermons… more sermons… numbing ranks of sermons… a third copy of the identical Paley tract.
I scanned shelf after shelf, finding more and more of the same dull book-dealers’ leavings. Junk. All junk. The Bequest library was a fake. Not even a volume of dear old Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
On the other hand, where does the wise man hide a pebble? On the beach. Where does the wise man hide a leaf…?
Perhaps. In the center of the far wall, opposite the door, my flicking circle of torchlight found a cleared space and a long metal desk or table. One the steel surface, an old-fashioned blotting pad; on the pad, a book like a ledger that lay invitingly open. Cautiously, cautiously, now. There was something almost too tempting about…
What I felt was minute but inexplicable. I might have put it down to nerves, but I never suffer from nerves. A sinking feeling? I backed rapidly away, and my bootheel snagged on something, a slight step in the floor. The floor had been smooth and even. Now the torch beam showed bad news: a large rectangle of iron had sunk noiselessly, with the metal table and myself on it, just less than half an inch into the floor. I thought hydraulics, whipped around instantly and blurred toward the door faster than anyone I have ever met could have managed. Too late.
It was all very ingenious. Victorian technology, for God’s sake. The 3-D maze construction of Area B must have concealed any amount of dead space for tanks, conduits, and machinery. Now, tall vertical panels within the deep door frame had hinged open on either side to show iron under the old wood, and oiled steel bars moved silkily out and across, barring the way. By the time I reached the door, the closing space was too narrow: I could have thrust myself a little way in, only to have neat cylinders punched out of me. The heavy rods from the left finished gliding into their revealed sockets at the right. And that was that.