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Some take the librarian’s “Shhhh!” to mean that the library is a place for peace. It was never thus. On every shelf ideas make war. The silence is so that we may hear their screams.

Long Overdue , by Gertrude Steel

Anne

Anne stood looking up at the black silhouette of the library on a night of breaking glass. Beside her, the two strangers who had proved much stranger than they had first appeared, and they had been far from ordinary to start with.

It seemed that from the moment of Yute and Kerrol’s arrival her life had crumbled, and yet she knew that this day would have happened regardless of them. It was almost as if the nightmare had somehow summoned them to it, as witnesses from afar.

A small part of her wondered if perhaps her mind hadn’t broken at some point, and she had simply failed to notice. Maybe delusions were what enabled people to keep going when their world fell apart. Or worse still, perhaps each person walked around in the shroud of their own delusion all the time. The people of Amberg were certainly running around wearing versions of a world sewn for them by those hungry for power, a world in which the Jews were devils feasting off their flesh. Perhaps her version of events was just as false, and some more concrete reality dwelt in the overlap of many minds. Or worse, maybe there was none, no underlying reality at all, just competing sets of lies, all screaming to be heard, fighting to walk the stage alone behind the mask of unsullied truth.

Kerrol growled out a question.

“Window or door?” Yute supplied, before answering, “Doors seem far more civilised.”

“We should look around the back,” Anne said. Climbing the broad steps to the large front doors felt far too public. “But there won’t be anyone there. And the windows are all closed.” She huddled in her coat. It wasn’t cold for November, but it was still cold, and a mist was rising, the first of its tendrils questing among the bushes. Anne shivered. Amberg should welcome the fog. It was a night that needed something to hide its sins behind.

Yute led the way around the side of the building and, sure enough, there was a single door facing a gravelled area, a door of more modest size than those at the front entrance. Yute crunched his way up to it.

“Kerrol should try it,” Anne suggested. “He’s the strongest.”

Yute translated both ways. “He says that he spent his whole life until just a couple of weeks ago trapped in a library chamber, and never managed to open any of the doors that would have let him out. In the end it took a young woman very much like yourself to open the door he escaped by.”

Anne found this claim too strange to refute and wondered if it were perhaps some clever way of saying something she lacked the wit to recognise. Rather than argue, Anne went forward, and tugged on the letterbox. “Locked.” She stepped away.

Yute pursed his lips, then set a white fingertip to the keyhole. A moment later he gave a gentle push and the door swung inwards.

“It was locked,” Anne protested.

“You pulled. I pushed.”

“I…” Maybe she should have pushed, but it must have been locked. Late at night with all the lights off. Of course it was.

Yute went through. “The library still tends to let me go where I want to, even now.”

Anne followed on in. Kerrol came behind her, dipping his head beneath the doorjamb and growling something.

“It is dark, yes,” Yute agreed. “This is not the library. Though parts of that lie in darkness too.”

“It is the library.” Anne patted around for the switch. A click, and the hallway filled with electric light. The doors to either side must lead into administrative rooms, the public area lay ahead.

“Ingenious.” Yute looked up at the nearest light then raised a hand to shield his eyes before looking away. “There don’t seem to be many books for a library…”

Anne edged past him. “This way.”

She was going to lead on but paused instead, finding herself emboldened by events, ready to ask more questions. “I almost understand why you’re here, Yute. Though I couldn’t properly put it into words. You fit with the library somehow. But Kerrol?”

“She’s asking why you’re here, Kerrol.”

Kerrol regarded her from his great height, eyes dark and assessing.

Yute translated the soft snarling. “He’s hoping to keep his brothers from killing each other. He says that he’s very good at changing their minds, but he’s even better at knowing when he can’t.” More rumbles, so deep that the sorrow bled from them, requiring no interpretation. “And perhaps, if he’s honest, he’s here so that he doesn’t have to watch them do it.” Yute looked up at his companion with compassion as if all of this might be news to him too.

Anne nodded and, unsure how to reply to such an admission, she led them along the corridor. The door at the far end was unlocked and brought them out behind the librarians’ desk. At first the rows of shelving were just suggestions in shadow, but after a little hunting she found the switches she wanted and turned on half the lights.

Yute lifted the hatch in the wraparound desk and went out among the shelves. “There don’t seem to be many books for a library…”

Kerrol strolled after him, making an unimpressed kind of snort. Yute began to wander, much as he had in Madame Orlova’s shop. Running his fingers across the spines of books as he went, as if the briefest of touches were sufficient to know each from prologue to epilogue. Kerrol, who could almost look over the tops of the shelves, prowled, the tension outside not forgotten. For her part, Anne watched the strangers that she had led to a place that had, long ago, seemed as holy and perhaps more mysterious than even the synagogue with its giant scrolls and ancient songs. Her father had often brought Anne to the library as a young girl, even though they lived above a bookshop. The bookshop, he said, was a beach where the currents of chance washed up this book or that book, and beachcombing through such wonders had a charm all its own. The library, though, was a cultivated collection. The selection was, admittedly, only as broad as the minds of its librarians, and only as deep as the pockets of the city council. However, where the librarians saw a gap, they tried to fill it, acting with deliberation to ensure a full spread of answers to every question a curious mind might conjure. Or, failing that, perhaps at least to equip that person with the tools to discover their own answer.

The library, Anne had come to think, was an imperfect reflection of something divine, a shadow of the impossible. It was shaped by bias, prejudice, and held within its pages every human failing. And yet, in its conception and in its ideals there ran an echo of some great song that if it could only be heard would wrap every listener in its beauty and lift them to some higher, unattainable ground.

The violence of the night outside, the horror of seeing her loved ones taken away to uncertain futures, hadn’t left Anne. A large part of her still wanted to rage against it all, to demand that Yute and Kerrol use whatever magics they had to make things right. To scream at them for their aimless patience, for their wasting of time among the sleeping shelves whilst outside the book-burners spewed their vitriol, broke glass, and shattered lives. But she stood in silence and when Yute’s path took him from her view, she followed.

“This book”—Yute plucked a slim volume from the shelves, seemingly at random—“was written a century ago, by a man of your faith. Heinrich Heine. A poet. He says on page forty-seven, ‘ Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also .’ This I have seen recently with my own eyes. The wisdom sits here, waiting quietly to be found again.” He returned the book to the shelf and moved on.

Yute’s wanderings brought him to the foyer where wide steps led from the double doors up to an open, tiled space. Two grand statues in the classic style faced each other across the expanse of floor, and midway between them stood a wooden lectern where the librarians always left an open book as if welcoming visitors with an immediate offer of the printed page.

“Do you know who they are?” Yute nodded towards the statues.

“Plato and Aristotle,” Anne said from memory. “Though I don’t know which is which.” The two men stood in togas, one staring at the other over an open book, both with curling hair, fine beards, and marble musculature that seemed unlikely given that both were scholars rather than famed athletes. But then again, the library was a temple to fiction. The statues were almost certainly not marble either, but plaster reproductions.

“Ah, Aristotle. ‘ Memory is the scribe of the soul. ’ That’s one of his, and he was not wrong. Where I come from,” Yute said, “we call that one Irad.” He indicated the man with the book. “And his brother is Jaspeth.” He turned towards the second figure. “But we all have our own traditions.”

Kerrol appeared from the aisles. Yute waved a hand at the statues. “Irad and Jaspeth’s grandfather, Cain, killed his brother. He invented murder. The third brother, Seth, failed to stop them. Let us hope you are more successful at finding a peace between your siblings.”

Anne had never had a brother or sister. Her mother had died before Anne could properly fix the woman’s face into her mind, taken by tuberculosis on a sea of coughing and red-stained handkerchiefs. Anne looked down at her fingers. She had touched Kerrol’s hand before she had known that she was going to, finding it warm and slightly bristly, much as she remembered her father’s chin. “Where are they now? Your brothers?”

“He doesn’t know,” Yute replied for him. “But Mayland will have taken them to the vaults. It’s the easiest place from which to locate the book he’s looking for. Something that powerful, that dangerous, would shine through the divide. It would be a star in those dark heavens.”

Kerrol cocked his head, absorbing the news.

“The vaults?” Anne asked.

“The graveyard.” Yute tried to wave an explanation into being. “Where books go to die.”

“Like the genizah,” Anne said. “In the synagogue there’s a room, the genizah, where we put damaged Torah. Anything with the name of God on it, really. It’s forbidden to destroy them. So, we keep them.”

“Like the genizah,” Yute agreed. “I can see you come from a cultured people. And what are any letters but the name of the divine waiting to be assembled? All alphabets are the bones of something holy. The most powerful tools ever placed in any hand. The library keeps its books: damaged, beyond use, even burned. It keeps them.”

Yute turned to the open book on the lectern. He reached out, touched it, and recoiled as if he had stuck his fingers into some foulness on the street. “This however—” He shuddered. “This was not well done.”

Anne came to stand beside him. “ My Struggle , it’s the chancellor’s book. I think everyone’s supposed to have a copy these days to show their loyalty to the Fatherland.”

“When I was a servant of the library I would have said—if asked—that there were no evil books. Just books. Some which might turn weak men evil. Some written by weak evil men.” He shook his head. “But I am both less and more than I was. More frail. Stronger.” He glanced left then right, then pointed at the lectern. “And here it sits, a book that many might say is begging to be burned. Jaspeth looks down on us and he says we should burn the library down with it, so that there is no place for poison to linger. Irad gazes at us and says that the shelf cannot choose which book sits upon it. He tells us that the option to read this book should be there, for good or ill, that memory is our right and our duty. Surround it with sanity, context, and judgement, but don’t deny it a place.”

“And what does Yute say?” Anne asked mainly to avoid the question being turned her way. In her mind’s eye creamy pages crinkled beneath the fire’s hunger. The covers blackened, the swastika becoming smoke. Justice. Cleansing. And yet…and yet…however vile the crime, she couldn’t be one of the wild-eyed crowd, face lit by the conflagration’s glow, smoke and ashes all around as words burned.

“Yute says that worlds fall to ruin when those who dwell there take into their hands the gates of truth and seek to usher through only what they feel is true or right or proper.” The librarian shook his head. “And worlds burn when Irad has his way. And with Jaspeth’s forgetting also: the path is longer, slower, mired in more primitive killing, but no less awful, and the destination is the same fire.”

Kerrol, who had been silent since Yute had mentioned his brothers, stepped up and directed a growl at the man.

“I know you followed me for a third path. And you have every right to ask where it’s leading us. But I don’t know.” Yute hung his head, the thin veil of his snow-white hair falling around his equally pale face. “I simply don’t know.”

From back among the shelves, hidden from view, something struck the ground with extraordinary force. As if a church bell had fallen from a great height. Anne felt the floor tremble beneath her feet.

“A bomb?” It made no sense. Were they bombing now? Out in the streets? But this had not been outside. It was here. With them.

“I don’t—” A second blow cut Yute off.

“We should—” A third buried Kerrol’s opinion.

Something like oil spread out from beneath the nearest shelves, a thin, perfectly black sheet, liquid and flowing.

“What is it?” Anne stepped back.

“The library’s blood,” Yute breathed. “It runs here…I was wrong…this place is more important than I thought.”

“Why is it bleeding?” Anne took another step back and, as she did, the black flow began to withdraw, as if the floor had developed a gradient in the other direction.

“It’s under attack.” Yute shook his head. “Something has happened. Somewhere, some-when the library is dying.”

The black “blood” withdrew beneath the shelves, leaving no stain on the floor tiles.

Slowly, unwillingly, Yute began to follow. Anne couldn’t see anything different about the library, but even so, she sensed it. They were no longer alone. Among the aisles something was moving.

Kerrol growled, a long rumbling growl. For once Yute didn’t translate.

“What did he say?” Anne could hear footsteps now, heavy, unhurried footsteps. Ahead of them among the aisles. Oddly, she almost knew what Kerrol had said. Almost but not quite. And she was almost sure that he’d said something just now that she did understand.

“He said that I’d told him the blood was harmless, a tool to be shaped to a purpose. That I’d said it was only a danger to those who were afraid of it, because then it becomes an Escape. It takes the shape of their fear and hunts them.”

“So,” said Anne, trying to sound braver and less out of her depth than she felt, “why do you still sound as if there’s a problem?”

Yute stopped advancing. “Because I’m terrified.”

Kerrol growled again, a more muted sound with something of a yelp in it. Anne didn’t ask what he’d said, because she imagined it was the same question as her own. “What have you made?”

A crashing, the source unseen. The splintering fall of one shelf into another, spilling books in a thudding rain. “A demon. My fear’s made a demon.” Yute started to turn, clutching his umbrella. “I think we should run.”

Kerrol placed himself between the shelves and Anne, snarling out a challenge that would send a pack of wolves running with their tails between their legs.

“Yes, you’ve fought them before.” Yute hesitated, seeing that Kerrol was making a stand. “But this is different. In the library, the blood’s only source for inspiration is you. Oh, it can take some form from books too, but the raw power behind it is all you.”

Kerrol growled out another comment. Anne was starting to feel the shape of the words inside these utterances where first she’d heard only an animal’s complaints.

“We’re out in the world,” Yute replied. “And not a good one. The Escape’s drinking it all in. All the poison of a sick city. The wilful ignorance of a people who know in their secret hearts that they’re being lied to and listen anyway because to them the lies are sweet.” His hands moved through the air as if he could feel the emotions he described, flowing around his bloodless fingers, drawn in by the unseen gyre that was the demon being built from the black blood of the library.

The nearest shelf fell towards them, spilling books, and the monster stood behind it, revealed in silhouette, sucking down the electric light and returning nothing. If it had been drawn from Anne’s nightmares it would have worn a uniform and borne a swastika. Yute’s fear had crafted something blind and shambling. It swayed towards them, reaching with strangling hands, bleeding anger. Its presence deadened Anne’s internal voice, pushing back her intelligence to expose primitive emotion of the sort immune to reason, driven by primal hungers, the logic of selfishness, the justice of the mob.

It brought with it a blindness, not of the eyes but of the mind. A blindness and a darkness more profound than the one from which Helen Keller so marvellously escaped, and one that was not inflicted as a wound on the innocent, as hers had been, but required a degree of complicity to enter. Anne could feel Yute’s fear of it, and in that moment knew her own.

Kerrol moved with inhuman swiftness, wrenching up an entire reading bench and wielding the weight of wood as Anne would swing a stick. He brought his impromptu weapon down on the Escape’s head with such force that it splintered into two halves.

Incredibly, the monster barely flinched. Instead, it surged past Kerrol as though he were unworthy of its attention. Even with this turn of speed added to the Escape’s formerly sluggish approach, there should have been enough time to run. Somehow there wasn’t. Anne remained mired in the horror of its advance, and a moment later found herself swept up in a hand the colour of midnight and larger than the paws of the stuffed bear in the burgermeister’s hall.

Yute saw her plight and turned from his retreat towards the main doors. With the desperate expression of a man braving his own worst fears for someone else, the librarian seemed to draw on the books scattered all around his feet. Even as Anne was hoisted aloft and felt the awful pressure of the Escape’s fingers close around her throat, she tried to scream at the others to run.

Yute stood amidst a whirlwind that touched the visible only briefly here and there. It seemed as if the books were smoking and that smoke, pulled into the invisible gyre, wrapped around him, weaving an ethereal armour. And thus armoured, he flung himself at the Escape.

Anne hung, choking, while for a moment the two combatants came together with a sizzling like meat hitting a hot skillet. Yute didn’t fight, but hung on to his foe, while the aura around him seared the dark flesh, smoking it away to dissipate in the air. Even as Anne’s vision filled with black spots, she thought she could see lines of text orbiting Yute’s limbs, as if the words had risen from the fallen books and joined his service, trying to burn their way through the thick layers of ignorance that protected the Escape from the self-awareness that would surely tear it apart.

With an angry shrug, the Escape sent Yute staggering back. A swing of its arm launched him into the air on an arc leading towards the foyer. The sort of blow that shatters ribs and breaks spines.

The Escape strode after Yute like a dog pursuing a toy. Anne found herself dangling, an afterthought, still cut off from the next breath as her heels trailed the ground. Kerrol had found another weapon, a plank that had been a shelf, but his strength proved useful only in producing splinters. The Escape hardly noticed his efforts. Its stomping advance on Yute’s sprawled form placed the lectern squarely between them. As it drew near the book set in that place of honour, the monster seemed to draw strength from it, pulling barely seen threads of power towards itself in much the same way as Yute had gathered his own from the wider library.

Kerrol threw himself forward, seizing the arm that had hold of Anne, trying to free her without breaking her in the process. A heavy backhander sent him to the floor with sickening force.

Anne drew in a long-denied breath in a gasp. “Stop it!”

The Escape tossed her down as if stung. She scrambled to her feet, coughing, and—mostly on purpose—knocked the chancellor’s book to the floor as she did so. Quite how she had managed to steal a lungful of air past the Escape’s grip she couldn’t say, but, as it loomed above her fallen companions, the mismatch between her strength and its mattered less and less to her.

Out in the harshness of the night a different calculus was at work. There were monsters there too and interposing herself between them and her grandfather would have earned her a jackboot in the face, achieving nothing, but Anne refused to believe the same rules held sway here in the library. This was magic—she couldn’t deny that any longer—and if magic danced to the same tune as the rest of the world, then the library, and her grandfather’s own bookshop, had lied to her for her whole life.

The Escape’s huge hands descended towards her, and Anne raised her own to intercept them.

“I know you.” She caught its wrists. The monster that had so haunted Yute, the one that had defeated his enchantments, was one Anne had grown up with. Nothing scared the librarian more than a wilful refusal to acknowledge facts, the elevation of ignorance to a virtue, the casting of curiosity and intellect as defects of character. But Anne had swum from childhood to the shores of her majority through such toxic waters. She had read the book that lay behind her on the floor. Not out of any appetite for its contents but out of an honest desire to understand the mind and motivation behind its crudely written screed. And although she knew that anger and hate were valid responses to its message, she had felt pity for those poisoned by it.

“I know you.” She knew why they hated her kind. They hated because humans are tinder waiting for the flame. The chancellor had given them an excuse to hate, the relief of having someone to blame. It was a selfish, rambling, poorly worded excuse, but they had taken it. Not because this country, this people, were inherently evil, but because they were weak, like all men. Their morality a fragile thing, a flower to be cherished and grown, too easily corrupted.

The strain nearly buckled her. But where Kerrol’s strength had been knocked aside with contempt, Anne’s frailty somehow endured. Midnight flesh bubbled and ran and smoked beneath her grip with a ferocity Yute’s attack had been unable to match.

“I know you,” Anne repeated.

The Escape started to lose form.

“You’re clay.” She released its arms and stepped forward to place her palms upon its torso. “I’m the potter.”

And, like falling water, the blood of the library was all around her, once more merely a puddle.