| January 2008 |
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FICTION
The Library
by Calgary's S-J Krahn
To anyone else, there was nothing special about this library. For us, it was the history that we had built up
around it since we had started coming here years ago. No one else saw what we did. No one else saw
what I did.
This library didn’t loom on a quiet street with intricate architectural designs carved in heavy oaken doors,
and it didn’t have thickly carpeted stairs or shelves in need of ladders because they reached to the domed
and painted ceiling. It wasn’t a futuristic computing centre with a sleek, aerodynamic design, a great
aluminum fang gleaming against a perpetually night-swept backdrop. It wasn’t a marble-pillared
archaeological feat, and it certainly wasn’t worth burning, flames just licking at the steadfast stone, but fully
devouring the myriad papyrus scrolls with smoke-infused vigour.
This library was a two-storey job, bound at the edges by crumbling bricks and plaster. Its IN door,
embossed in chipped red paint, opened automatically when anyone passed by, a chomping jaw
supplicating to the ignorant outside world to toss it a few readers as hungry for knowledge as it was for
visitors. Its OUT door had much less exercise, on account of the library being attached at the back to a
large downtown mall, the kind of mall with glass elevators and five floors, artificial trees arranged around
circular fountains with coin-swamped waters, trendy shops open to The Public when The Public is a tight-
throated, white-collared class, and an extravagant movie theatre at the end opposite the library, decorated
elaborately to masquerade as a launch-pad. More than anything this library was used as a portal for
shoppers and movie-goers bustling along the street who were too lazy to journey around to the main mall
entrance. So on a typical day, the OUT door wouldn’t see half the persons the IN door would, because by
the time they were done making their multiple purchases and/or having their eyes glazed over by the
flashes of an eight-storey theatre screen, the humble library would have been closed for an hour already.
Inside, an elderly myopic woman behind a counter with false wooden panelling peered over her glasses
at anyone who chose to enter, and though her pallid eyes seemed to see nothing past the prominent
bridge of her nose, we were always sure that she could see every thought and image that raced through
our little brains as we blinked to adjust to the purring white and orange lights, shivered a little from the
cold, shook out our ponytails, and wiped the snot off our upper lips before proceeding past the check-out
to explore the aisles of Dickinson, Frost, Shelley, and Woolf.
The shelves of the aisles were built of a dented grey metal and stood about five or six feet off the dirty
brown and orange burr of a carpeted floor. Where the floor met the graffitied walls, the carpet was peeling
back, and cold, stark cement bore through. Two sets of stairs were hidden away in a yellow hallway at the
back of the library. The heavy metal door to the staircase always swung treacherously to its frame as soon
as I took my full weight off of it. Gina pressed her body against it while I scrambled in and held it for her
from the inside so that we would be safe from its evil slamming tendency. One set of stairs led up, and
another led down, but the chain link slung across the latter signalled to people like us that we weren’t
welcome in the basement of this library. So we traversed upwards instead, hitting three separate landings
before reaching the top. The door that welcomed us was the equal of the downstairs door in its weight and
stubbornness. Working together, we would twist the handle, simultaneously throw our bodies backwards
till the door followed, then scuttle into a musty world nearly identical to that of the main level.
One single difference held us in its rapture: an ancient microfiche reader sat haunched in the far corner,
accompanied by three cardboard boxes of unorganized, unlabelled film rolls. We spent many hours
feeding random rolls into the machine and poring over newspaper and magazine articles from before our
parents were born.
To the right of the microfiche reader was what seemed like an oversized cupboard door that opened into
the electric dumbwaiter, which had always been the butt of many inside jokes between Gina and I. (We
couldn’t help giggling just speaking the word: “Dumb. Waiter!” Fits of laughter followed.) Its downstairs
door opened from behind the librarian’s desk. So of course we never got a chance to try our hands at
dumbwaiting.
I was twelve and Gina was thirteen when we first began to visit this library together, on autumn and spring
afternoons, riding our bicycles together after school. In the summer, we would enjoy the long walks from
our neighbourhoods. Being twelve meant two things for me: first, that my parents granted me more
independence than I had ever had before; I was allowed to explore the city so long as I had a friend with
me and had emergency telephone numbers memorized; second, it meant that I could have my very own
library card, with my very own name printed on it, with no limit on the number of books I could take out at
one time, and with a record of my very own over-due charges. Knowing what the answer would be, I asked
the old woman behind the counter for my overdue balance each time I took out a book. Still, I was strangely
disappointed when her squinting and quivering reply was “Zero dollars and zero cents.”
We hadn’t always come to this library. Our library trips began with a seventh grade challenge to visit every
one in the city. We were determined to win the challenge (the prize being a free book chosen from the
annual junior high book fair), so our bikes had quite a good work-out that week as we raced from library to
library to have a quick glance around and to collect the stamp from the librarian that was our evidence of
having been there. Most libraries were updated, well-kept, modern. This one was special because it was
old, dirty, and to us, mysterious.
With our appetite for mystery and fantasy, our first trip to this library had us in a fit of imagination as
provoked by the chain across the stairway, the screeches and bumps and creaks we conjured in our
minds, and the distant stares from the white-eyed librarian, the ones that made us grip each other’s arms
as shivers tore our spines. We spent an entire Friday night discussing this library, curled up in sleeping
bags on Gina’s bedroom floor, trading predictions about what kind of dangerous operations might be
taking place in the basement and what secret documents might be hidden under the peeling carpet. After
that night, we were addicted. We couldn’t stop going back to peer through the spaces between books,
watching the other people who used the library, our walkie-talkies beeping as we whispered to each other
from across the library. We loved to gaze down the stairs, willing the chain to shatter before our eyes. We
loved to feed microfiche into the old reader and try to find “evidence” from the Labour Page and the Women’
s Homemaking Column. And we loved to read the graffiti on the walls, as many words as could fill a book.
Eventually, when none of our gleeful suspicions could be confirmed, returning to the library became
something we did purely out of habit, and for the same reasons other people go to the library: to find
something to read. By the time that summer passed and we were in eighth grade, we returned solely to
look for books and magazines that piqued our interest. It was our tradition. It was what made our
friendship special to me.
A few months later, it was all over. Gina started making excuses about having to go straight home after
school, and I believed her until one day I went ahead to the library by myself and saw through the glass of
the IN door, then the OUT door, then the windows behind the check-out counter, Gina walking along with
three other girls from her class. My face fell. We had been placed in different classes that year, but I had
assumed that wouldn’t change our relationship.
I stopped asking Gina to go with me to the library. After awhile, we stopped seeing each other altogether
save for in the halls at school, where she would give me a half-hearted wave if I half-smiled at her first. I
couldn’t help getting the feeling that she had grown up, away from kiddy stuff like mystery, fantasy, and
reading. The library became my home away from home more than it ever had been before. Every day I
went straight there from school to immerse myself in the work of whichever author could spirit me away
from reality.
At eighteen, little had changed. I had a few friends, but it was impossible for me to become close with
them because none of them shared with me the past, present, and future encapsulated by my obsession
with my library, I didn’t think that they truly knew me. At the same time, I didn’t want to try to bring them
closer to me, because it would bring them closer to my library, the one thing outside of myself that at this
point in my life, I truly possessed. And so, I continued to isolate myself from the world, interested only in
forming bonds with the characters of my favourite novels, in tracing the strings of words in my favourite
poems, in glancing up from my reading and spying nonchalantly upon the library’s other occupants. This
was my life, in the words on these pages on these shelves.
Shutting the folding door to the phone booth behind me, I was shaking as I pressed a quarter and a dime
into the coinslot. I dialed the number with stiff fingers and looked out the glass panels into the slushy
streets where trucks, taxis and cars weaved lines of traffic honking and blinking impatient red circle lights
into the stern faces of the walkers, tall women in chunky black heels, picking their way through chunks of
snow, men in shiny brown shoes hugging their briefcases to their chests, hidden by layers of dress shirt,
tie, suit jacket, and matching outer shell, all in grey to match the filth spinning from under vehicle wheels.
None of them noticed the shivering people who weren’t walking or driving, because this street was their
home. One man with longish brown hair and the sprouts of a beard and moustache, a ripped green army
jacket, and fingerless gloves, was leaning against the sanctuary of the telephone booth, muttering. I heard
him from in here. “Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.” I noticed him, and I noticed the others, trying to be part of
the woodwork, just noticeable enough so that they might be taken pity upon and given a few coins or a half-
drunk latte from Starbucks. I think the others just pretended not to notice them: a flock of girls younger than
myself in a narrow alleyway, grossly underclothed for this kind of weather, and watched over hawkishly by
a pacing thirty-year-old man, tough-looking but with an appealing face; a pair of older men huddled
together under a holey forest green blanket on the stoop of a store closed for the night; “Amen. Amen.
Amen.”
“Hello?”
“Gina, it’s me.”
The sharp intake of breath confirmed that she recognized my voice even though after a moment of shock
she pulled on a mask and replied coldly, “I’m sure I don’t know who ‘me’ is.”
I sighed quickly, but indulged her. “It’s Riego. Gina, listen. I have something really important to talk to you
about -“
“Riego, if this is about the time…”
Incidentally, I didn’t know she had been behind that bout of cruelty in which many of the girls in my grade
got together and decided to try to drown my bike in the river. But my mind couldn’t deal with that right now
on top of the strange feeling that had crept up on me and was now spreading through my arteries with
every beat of my heart.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that; can you please just listen for a minute? I’ve been at the library today and -“
“Um, Riego, do we have to talk right now?” Gina asked abstractedly. “I have some place to be, people to
see…”
“No, Gina, don’t hang up!” I pleaded. “I need your help!”
My voice must have conveyed my earnestness and urgency enough to catch Gina’s attention, because she
sounded concerned, and kind of scared, when she spoke.
“What - what is it?” she stammered.
The day had been like any other except that when I came with Gina, we never used to go when it was
winter: the walk was too long and cold, and the snow was no good on our bicycles. I was planning on
doing some research for a final English paper I was writing on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. My high school
library didn’t have enough choice for sources, I told myself, doing as I often did, attempting to justify my
daily visits to my downtown library. I had been giving excuses ever since my mother had come to me,
worriedly asking if I was all right, if anything was wrong, which snowballed into why didn’t I have any close
friends, why didn’t I ever do anything, except go to that stupid library? I could never come up with any
reasonable answers, but my unreasonable attempts were enough to calm my own qualms about it. My
parents just had to deal, just had to exchange concerned looks across the dinner table when I was either
deathly silent or jabbering exuberantly about a quote I had come across in a book earlier in the day.
So when I slushed with my winter jacket and snow boots toward the IN door that afternoon, and it received
me anxiously, and the tiny myopic librarian peered at me over her glasses, all the same as usual. I had no
way to predict the air of the bizarre reality that would overcome me as I paced the aisles. There’s no way I
could have known that I would forget all about my research paper and resort to pretending to find books
when I was really keeping my eye on the strangeness that was going on around me.
After a pause and a brief glance around, I couldn’t help but feel that something wasn’t right. There was a
smell greater than usual of dust and must as if many of the books had recently been opened and left to air
out. None of the books seemed out of place, but as I approached the nearest shelf I realized that the white
card taped on the side, which usually indicated the number range based on the Dewey Decimal system,
instead bore a single capital letter in a cursive scrawl: R. Had the shelves been rearranged
alphabetically? And indeed, none of the usual books were on this shelf, but instead books about radios,
railroads, Sir Walter Raleigh and rape adorned the dented metal.
Curious, I went on to the next aisle, and stopped short when I found not S, but I. Ideology, internment
camps, and melting ice caps appeared here, but I was chilled with the knowledge that I followed R in my
name.
Too fearful to go on to the next aisle quite yet, I chose a book about Italy and cracked the spine. That’s
when I heard a crunch, followed by a blood-curdling scream.
I slammed the book shut, and immediately the scream stopped. Turning the book over in my hands to
investigate, I saw that the spine of the book’s cover no longer said “Italy” and was in fact not a book’s spine
at all. It was a spine of miniature bones, perhaps the size of a kitten’s back, now jagged and broken. The
book crumbled in my hands and fell to the floor in a light dust.
Gingerly, I chose another book from the shelf and held it lightly. It did not scream when I opened it. But,
flipping through, I was shocked and dismayed to find that all the pages were empty. More than frightened
for myself, I was frightened that my beloved words had fled.
Quickly, I retreated to the open and gazed down the row at the remaining shelves. E, G, O. I was not
surprised. Nor was I surprised that, when I checked them, the books on those shelves were blank as
well. That’s when I noticed that the librarian was not at her desk. I rushed over and examined the counter.
Like the books, it was empty. Where the old Mac check-out system was once set up, a single book lay
open to its final page.
I read the words from where I stood, upside-down, and I murmured them as my eyes traced the unfamiliar
curves of the letters.
“…and the choice was thus made for her. But it was believed that ultimately, she would have chosen the
same path for herself.”
The words caught in my throat and I jumped in surprise as a white head appeared from behind the
counter and the librarian raised herself to her feet, using the ledge for leverage.
“Just looking,” I said feebly, backing away from the knowing whites of her eyes.
I turned and broke through the stairwell door with the force of my entire body in motion, desperate to lose
the burning gaze that told me she somehow knew all the secrets of my soul.
To my left, there was a cement wall where once a simple chain and set of steps had inspired so many
stories in my heart and so many unanswered questions in my mind. I had to concede that I would never
visit the basement. Though I might sometime come to understand the general history of what once
happened there, I would never experience the torture, the abuse, the blood spilled, grim laughter.
Now, the stairs led only up. I was in the basement.
“Oh, Gina,” I sobbed, flinging my arms around her. “I’m so glad you came. I knew you would. I just knew
it.”
Gina held me and patted my back in comfort. “I had no choice,” she confided grimly. “I knew this day
would have to come.”
I sniffed and pulled away a little, looking at her in puzzlement. She ceased patting me. “What do you
mean?” I gulped. “How did you know?”
Gina drew in a deep breath and fixed me with apologetic eyes. “Listen, Riego…the reason I stopped
coming to the library isn’t what you think. The reason we stopped being friends isn’t what you think. I just –
“ She broke off.
“Well?” I demanded.
“I found out something about this library that I didn’t want to,” she said cryptically. Before I could protest for
her to expand, she raised a hand and rushed on. “Let me try to explain. I was never sure that what I found
out was true. But then you called me, and it all came rushing back to me, and I decided I couldn’t…I
couldn’t let you face it alone. And now I know it’s true.” Then, as if the next words explained everything that
had happened that day, she whispered conspiratorially, “I saw old Mr. Simlow on the way over here.”
“Mr. Simlow?” I cried in confusion. “Who’s Mr. Simlow? And what does he have to do with anything?”
“If you’ll just calm down and shut up,” Gina hissed, her eyes sorry for her having to speak so harshly, “I’ll
tell you everything.”
I was taken aback at first, but I closed my eyes briefly, then nodded. Gina gave a responding nod, then led
me to the table and chairs in the children’s section, which stood about a foot off the ground, but we sat
there together, our knees far above the seats of the chairs and our hands folded upon the table.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Mr. Simlow. We’ll start with him. I’m surprised you don’t remember…but oh well,
all that matters is…oh, Riego, he was our seventh grade teacher. Can’t you remember? He’s the one
who came up with the whole library relay thing that went on that year. Don’t you see? It was a trap! For
us! Mr. Simlow knew that we two were the only ones in the class who would actually go around to all the
libraries, including this one. He planned it, Riego…he wanted us to keep coming back here.”
“But how did you –“
Gina hushed me quietly. “It was an off-hand comment my mom said one day. She asked me how I liked
the library that was the newest in the city, and I asked her which one was that, because yes I had been to
all of them, but that was months ago, and so many of them were clean and pretty and new-smelling. And
she looked at me, surprised, and said, silly, it’s the one you go to all the time, every day. Turns out she
had just read some article in the paper about the city’s newest library, and the address it gave was the
address of…of this library! It made sense to her then that we would travel so far just to go to a stupid
library, because if it were the newest, it would be the freshest, the best library of all, with scores of new
books just itching to be read by eager children like us! I mumbled something, then ran to my room, and
thought about it, and wanted to call you, but I couldn’t. Please, don’t ask me why, Riego. I’ll never know
that. I scared myself into thinking two things: one, that it was true, and that something very very strange
was happening at this library, because it was obviously so old and decrepit and disgustingly musty, not
new at all. So that’s why I didn’t want to go back. And then secondly, that it wasn’t true, that the paper had
just printed the wrong address, and that’s why I didn’t tell you, because I thought you would think that they
were wrong, and you would want to keep going. Or that you would think they were right and would want to
keep going, just to investigate it. And I was spooked, Riego! I still have books that I never brought back,
years overdue now; Ray Bradbury and Stephen King and R.L. Stine; I consumed that kind of horror back
then, from kiddie stuff to grown-up stuff, and it scared me out of my mind! I threw those books under my
bed, and there they’ve stayed; they gave me ideas about this place, made me think it was haunted with
creatures that would rip my heart out and suck my brain out through my ear.
“And moreso than that, Riego…I was, well…I was scared of you.”
She paused from her rant, and I stared at her a moment, before my face fell. How could she be scared of
me? I was no monster! And I had no desire to eat hearts and brains; my only desires were to read! to
learn! to know! and to come here, to the only place where I ever belonged.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully, shaking her head now. “I don’t know. It’s just that, well . . .
you were always into the whole library thing more than I was. You came up with the most creative ideas of
what could be going on down there in the basement –“ I shivered, knowing now what was really going on
down there “– and it made me think that anything you said could be true. Because when you talked about
it, or wrote about it, it came to life in my mind. Your exquisite descriptions, your precise and daunting
words…they scared me. I thought that maybe, somehow, you could make things happen here.”
“But what about Mr. Simlow!” I protested. “If you knew it was him, why would you blame me?”
“I didn’t know that back then,” she explained quickly. “That’s something I only figured out today when I saw
him. And I knew when you called me that you were in trouble. It couldn’t be you. It was…well, I haven’t
figured that part out. All I know is that, whatever we said in those days about this library, it was all true. We
were right about this place.”
My heart hammering against my ribcage, I leaned my back against a shelving unit that stood next to the
dumbwaiter against the wall. It was just as wide as the others even though it couldn’t be accessed from
both sides, so its placement against the wall was awkward. But the library was so crammed with shelves
that it just wouldn’t have fit anywhere else. These thoughts, which had skimmed undetected across the
surface of my brain for perhaps years, now developed themselves fully, trying to distract me. I brushed
them away and tried to concentrate by breathing in slowly through my nose, out through my mouth, and
closing my eyes.
An inconstant humming next to my ear overpowered the usual humming of the overhead lights, and my
eyes snapped open. The sound continued so that I could feel its light tickly vibrations against my ears,
their tiny hairs standing up, reaching out to the diapason of intangible notes, strung together brilliantly and
yet, in some strange and stirring way, terribly. In the slowest motion I could make, I twisted to face the
noise with my eyes, as if I could somehow then hear it better, or at least discover its mystical source.
I jumped! With a stifled scream, I clapped my hands over my mouth, and the humming grew louder in a
distressed manner; my scream had evidently upset him, and his eyes were squeezed shut, whereas
when I had taken in my first glimpse of his face, they were curiously wide, and grey-blue in their
innocence. The man, swaddled tightly in a multitude of white sheets, his head the only visible part of his
body, was lying, childlike, on the top shelf. The little wrinkles around his clenched eyes looked like tiny
spindles of lightning, fearful of me, and fierce in their intensity.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, taking a tentative step toward the shelving unit. “I’m sorry; it’s okay.” I spoke as if
molly-coddling a child, but my words felt misdirected. I was unsure of myself. He, on the other hand,
continued humming, but a little quieter now. “It’ll be all right,” I continued, trying to sound less
condescending. “Don’t you worry.”
I rested the tips of my fingers on the edge of the top shelf to show him that I carried no threat, and
mustered enough courage to look straight into his closed eyelids and wonder what was underneath, and
what was underneath that, what lay at the very core of his being. My curiosity was not forced by the
questions that had gripped me just a few moments before. It was starved, instead, by an inexplicable
attraction to not only this man’s muffled voice now, but also to him as a whole, his body, his head, his
indiscernibly encased mind, and the spirit which continued to transcend his unceasing music.
I went back to my breathing exercises to calm my pounding heart. I managed to speak once more. “What’
s your name?” I whispered audibly.
His humming slowed when I spoke, as though he wanted to hear me better. When I repeated myself
patiently, he opened one big, frightened eye, and ceased his song. He seemed to size me up with that
one eye, but not as the librarian had always done. His was an honest gaze, swooping down to my toes
smoothly, not jerkily, then up my legs, my knees, my thighs, my stomach, my chest, my neck, my face.
When he met my eyes, both his grey-blue eyes were open, and I could see the sensitivity that coupled with
his judgment, which wanted me to be, hoped that I was, a friend.
Placing my chin on the shelf near his face, I told him quietly, “My name’s Riego.”
Did I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes when I said my name, or was it my overactive, perhaps wishful,
imagination? I looked closer. My face only a foot away from his, I saw that he was much younger than I had
originally thought; he was maybe in his early twenties. His face was round and very white as though it had
never seen the light of day, his head smooth and devoid of hair. Two sparse, pale eyebrows knit
themselves together above his lightly-lashed eyes. A pair of thin, pink lips now parted just slightly as
though he was considering in that incomprehensible head of his the consequences of speaking to me.
Just looking at him, I somehow knew his story; I could see everything that had happened in his life playing
through my head, a film of horror and tragedy. He was not just any random person, and he wasn’t here for
just any random reason. He was the librarian’s son. Her paleness had been passed on to him, though his
eyes were so, so alive, not dead like hers. She had borne him late in life, in her mid-fifties, along with a
fraternal twin sister. Scarlett, her name was, and she was incredibly beautiful, with thick auburn locks and
a smiling pink face with dark green-brown speckled eyes. I could see her as a child in my mind, stooping
over her dear brother, who could not yet walk or talk, and mopping his forehead with a wet rag. He had a
fever, high in the hundreds. Mama wouldn’t come take care of him, even when Scarlett told her that he had
been retching all over the basement floor. Mama didn’t care.
Scarlett tried to entertain her brother by singing beautiful songs as she coaxed him to drink water and
tucked and re-tucked the few ragged blankets she had tighter around his body as he thrashed and cried in
delirium. She could read music, miraculously, as well as words, and all the songs she sang came from
books that she snuck from the top floor of the library. The door to the stairs was always locked, but the
dumbwaiter was never blocked; Scarlett thought maybe Mama believed it to be broken because she never
used it. So she climbed into the dumbwaiter and reached her hand out to press the button, and was able
to move up and down through the building with complete freedom, so long as Mama didn’t see. She was
hard of hearing, so the clunking and braying of the machine was no problem, but she could see
everything, even though her eyes were white and glazed. Consequently, Scarlett never stopped on the
main floor where Mama usually stayed.
Before he got sick, Scarlett taught him how to read. He couldn’t read aloud because he couldn’t speak,
but she could tell by the way his eyes lit up as they scanned the pages that he understood each word.
Mama visited them once each day with bits of food, the majority of which she forced Scarlett to consume
while he watched, freckles of saliva speckling his lips. She rarely spoke, just looked from one child to the
other, often shaking her head slowly, but sometimes nodding to herself.
During the time when he was ill, Scarlett was taken away by her mother. Though Mama returned day after
day, once each day, Scarlett never came back. He cried silently for weeks, humming the songs his sister
once sang to him. After many days had passed, he stole into the dumbwaiter to look for books. Books
were his only haven, his only medicine. For he was still sick, though not with a fever, but sick of heart,
which had once had the courage to live when it was loved by another little person, but which now was truly
and utterly alone.
“What’s your name?” I repeated.
He regarded me and quivered, then raised his eyebrows slightly. “Ahman.”
When he spoke, the scattered books on the shelf below his makeshift bed murmured in a rifling of curled,
yellowed pages, a chill breeze of emptiness disturbing their chapters, their justified words. They were
books that had once been on the main floor of the library. I had read them all before: Jane Eyre, Sophie’s
Choice, The Phantom of the Opera.
“Ahman,” I repeated simply, testing the word on my tongue.
The mystery of the library had disappeared for me. Or rather, it had displaced itself onto this strange white
ghost of a man. I no longer cared for finding the becauses of the whys that had sprung on the main floor,
pirouetting up the stairs from the basement, somersaulting through the aisles, swinging from and
dissipating the hanging lights. The only answer was a peace that ascended me when I looked into the
face of someone new and accepting.
Bracing myself, I tested with my right foot the stability of the bottom shelf. Very slowly, I lifted my other foot
off the floor and put all my weight onto my right. Though the rack groaned quietly, it held, and I climbed. A
few shelves from my goal, I slid my right knee on to the top, then my left. Ahman watched me intently as I
shifted over him and knelt between him and the wall, beside his torso. I leaned forward, my legs curled up
to my chest, and rested my cheek against his. I could feel his jaw moving; he spoke my name aloud.
“Riego.”
I raised my head and neck, and looked into his eyes, softening into trust as I reached with my hands and
stroked his face gently, brushed against his eyelashes, drew circles with my palm on his head. Feeling
the clammy cold of his skin warming under my redly throbbing hands comforted my mind, slowed my
heart. Encouraged, I drew my fingers along his neck and placed my palms on the sheets at his chest.
Their fluffy lightness, as if concealing pillows of air, suggested that more sheets wrapped him than I might
have guessed. I pressed gingerly down into them, and they began to compress beneath my pressure. My
hands frenzied themselves then to find his body, and they collapsed the sheets entirely until the cool, flat
metal of the shelf below could be felt through the muffling material. I looked to Ahman’s detached and lone
face; still his eyes watched me, now crinkled in concern as my heart skipped and I collapsed into a tearful
release.
A lone sob wailed from my throat, defying my attempts to keep my crying under control. With the blood-
warm tears trickling down my cheeks, into my nostrils and the corners of my lips, I felt a desperate,
lonesome longing, though I could not tell what for. The endless moments of pure despair were
interrupted by the weight of a hand on each of my shoulders. Calmed yet suspicious, I shuddered a last
weeping breath before opening my eyes.
“It all seems so clear now,” I whispered, stitching together in my mind all the fragments of what had once
been kicks and thrills, and was now a shrill reality.
Mr. Simlow. He, too, had once been obsessed with this library. He had visited it daily, reading books for
hours, and scribbling intriguing quotes he discovered on to the library walls so he could share them with
the people merely passing through, making them read as he made his students read. It was better than
going home to an empty, blank-walled apartment every afternoon after work.
The words he wrote on the walls were read most often by the librarian, a little younger then, and he had
planted a seed of an idea in her at least, even if he may have failed with each passerby and each student.
By day, he would sometimes climb the stairs and find a corner by the shelf along the wall to read from his
favourite books and masturbate, wishing he lived in a book instead of his mundane life. He loved the
library so much, he made sweaty love to it in his dreams at night.
The librarian watched Mr. Simlow. She knew that he wrote on her walls, she knew that he left his semen
on her bookshelves upstairs. She knew he came here to escape the walls of loneliness at home. But to
her, these library walls were her own walls of loneliness. She hated Mr. Simlow for making her sacred
lonely walls into friends that talked to him and protected him. But she loved him for talking to her through
the walls. The walls needn’t be so lonely after all.
The products of their strange, unspoken love affair were Scarlett and Ahman.
When Mr. Simlow first saw the telltale bump on the librarian, he left that day and went straight to a used
book store. There he bought as many books as he could afford, piled them in precarious towers all
around his empty blank-walled apartment, and never returned to the library. He wrote on his own walls
until they were grey instead of white and the words were all indiscernable from one another.
Now in his dreams, the library followed him home and swallowed him up.
The librarian wanted the children never to leave as her lover had.
Mr. Simlow found the auburn curls of Scarlett hard with the dried blood from her slit throat shining on his
doorstep years later. Cursive words cut into her calves read, “Look what your son did to my daughter.”
“He wanted to set his son free from that torture chamber,” Gina gulped.
“That’s when he came up with the idea for the library relay race,” I guessed, shivering that he would use us
so.
He would never be able to get in to Ahman without having his throat slit as Scarlett’s was by their
omniscient mother. So he had to send us instead. Mr. Simlow had as keen an eye as the librarian did,
and he knew that Gina and I would fall in love with the library as he had: the books, the intrigue.
And that was exactly what Mr. Simlow needed. Firstly, in order to keep Ahman alive and away from the
blind wrath of his mother, he had to ensure that someone, namely me, and Gina, visited the library on a
regular basis, as he had. The familiarity and the love-hate relationship had kept her relatively sane.
Secondly, he realized that the key to breaking the spell the librarian had over Ahman that kept him locked
inside was to physically blind her. And yet with her bizarre magic, only another brand of magic would
overpower her.
The only way to blind the librarian so Ahman could escape was for someone to afford him the same love
and dignity that Scarlett once did, for whoever loved him did so fearlessly, considering Scarlett’s bloody
murder by their mother.
Eventually, coming to love Ahman was simply an extension of having the courage to keep coming back to
the library, of loving the library.
“Riego, let’s leave while we can,” Gina urged me.
I just stared at her with blank eyes, still trying to take in the meaning of all the love, hatred, fear, and
emptiness.
“The librarian is blind now, Riego. Ahman is gone, and we can get out, too.”
The love, hatred, fear, and emptiness. It was my own.
Gina tugged at my arm, but I pulled back hard, almost knocking her over.
“Riego! You have to let go of this place!”
My eyes still did not see her. My ears heard her words, but they merely echoed inside my brain. They were
meaningless. Like the blank pages of all those books. Couldn’t we start the story over now? Rewrite it
ourselves? Or were we the authors already…
“Oh, Riego!” I heard Gina running towards the stairs. But she found only that the door had disappeared,
and only wall remained.
She would go crazy trying to escape…
Then I snapped out of it.
“Gina! Not the dumbwaiter!” I tried to grab her arm as she raced past me towards the dumbwaiter door.
“I knew I shouldn’t have come back!” she yelled, breaking away from me, and tearing open the door.
“Gina, not the dumbwaiter,” I sobbed. “It goes to the basement. It’s not safe.”
Ignoring me, she threw her body into the dark hole.
I was sure I heard Gina’s shriek as she plummeted through the empty shaft, the deafening crack as her
skull hit the cement floor at full impact, Scarlett’s sweet song trying to revive Gina’s lifeless body.
But she must have escaped. I have read the story of her life a number of times before, in this very library. I
even read it today. She would be a great writer, director, and producer of films. She would tell my story
through a medium that has little or nothing to do with books.
“Thank you, Gina,” I whispered.
Then it hit me that I was so very alone, as I recalled the closeness of the friendship Gina and I once
shared, and the closeness of spirit and kinship as Ahman’s cool skin brushed gently against mine.
Ahman’s eyes were inspecting me closely; his hands were on me; one of them brushed some stray wet
hair from my face then returned warmly to my shoulder. I opened my eyes more. He had unswathed his
naked body, the thick sheets bunching under his back and legs, though how he had done so without arms
– I believed I must have imagined that no flesh had been attached to his neck. I was so relieved that
whatever had just happened, imagination or not, had not happened, that I slid into tears again.
He held my body close beside his now-tangible one with his strong, round limbs and tenderly placed a
finger on each tear stain until it dissipated, magically, into his skin, away from mine. “I’m sorry,” he
murmured in a fragile yet husky voice in my ear, the same ear that had first heard his former humming.
“Hush now. It’ll be all right; don’t you worry.”
I opened my eyes to him. “You’re here?” I breathed urgently.
His lips knotted into a frail smile. “We are here,” he corrected me, then kissed my forehead peacefully until
my eyes wilted and I somehow rested, beside this cool, pale entity who spoke my name with conviction,
above all the books that had kept me company for so many years, on the top shelf, in this plebeian library
of the downtown core, this haven and bank of knowledge, this haunted relic of corruption and dangerous
secrets.
“Ahman. Ahman. Ahman,” I wept as my ears succumbed to the cautionary clanking of the dumbwaiter
retreating in the wall behind me. I thought of him, brave and hopeful, climbing out of the dumbwaiter,
approaching the OUT door downstairs, and, drawing in a deep breath, stepping outside into the world he
had read so much about that he undoubtedly knew more of its knowns and unknowns than anyone who
had tread its grounds for as many years.
My heart froze. I had forgotten to tell him…the evils and fears of this library…the evils and fears out there…
We would be in the same place forever.
More fiction in this issue:
Counting Down the Storm
Stoners
Back to main page
The Library
by Calgary's S-J Krahn
To anyone else, there was nothing special about this library. For us, it was the history that we had built up
around it since we had started coming here years ago. No one else saw what we did. No one else saw
what I did.
This library didn’t loom on a quiet street with intricate architectural designs carved in heavy oaken doors,
and it didn’t have thickly carpeted stairs or shelves in need of ladders because they reached to the domed
and painted ceiling. It wasn’t a futuristic computing centre with a sleek, aerodynamic design, a great
aluminum fang gleaming against a perpetually night-swept backdrop. It wasn’t a marble-pillared
archaeological feat, and it certainly wasn’t worth burning, flames just licking at the steadfast stone, but fully
devouring the myriad papyrus scrolls with smoke-infused vigour.
This library was a two-storey job, bound at the edges by crumbling bricks and plaster. Its IN door,
embossed in chipped red paint, opened automatically when anyone passed by, a chomping jaw
supplicating to the ignorant outside world to toss it a few readers as hungry for knowledge as it was for
visitors. Its OUT door had much less exercise, on account of the library being attached at the back to a
large downtown mall, the kind of mall with glass elevators and five floors, artificial trees arranged around
circular fountains with coin-swamped waters, trendy shops open to The Public when The Public is a tight-
throated, white-collared class, and an extravagant movie theatre at the end opposite the library, decorated
elaborately to masquerade as a launch-pad. More than anything this library was used as a portal for
shoppers and movie-goers bustling along the street who were too lazy to journey around to the main mall
entrance. So on a typical day, the OUT door wouldn’t see half the persons the IN door would, because by
the time they were done making their multiple purchases and/or having their eyes glazed over by the
flashes of an eight-storey theatre screen, the humble library would have been closed for an hour already.
Inside, an elderly myopic woman behind a counter with false wooden panelling peered over her glasses
at anyone who chose to enter, and though her pallid eyes seemed to see nothing past the prominent
bridge of her nose, we were always sure that she could see every thought and image that raced through
our little brains as we blinked to adjust to the purring white and orange lights, shivered a little from the
cold, shook out our ponytails, and wiped the snot off our upper lips before proceeding past the check-out
to explore the aisles of Dickinson, Frost, Shelley, and Woolf.
The shelves of the aisles were built of a dented grey metal and stood about five or six feet off the dirty
brown and orange burr of a carpeted floor. Where the floor met the graffitied walls, the carpet was peeling
back, and cold, stark cement bore through. Two sets of stairs were hidden away in a yellow hallway at the
back of the library. The heavy metal door to the staircase always swung treacherously to its frame as soon
as I took my full weight off of it. Gina pressed her body against it while I scrambled in and held it for her
from the inside so that we would be safe from its evil slamming tendency. One set of stairs led up, and
another led down, but the chain link slung across the latter signalled to people like us that we weren’t
welcome in the basement of this library. So we traversed upwards instead, hitting three separate landings
before reaching the top. The door that welcomed us was the equal of the downstairs door in its weight and
stubbornness. Working together, we would twist the handle, simultaneously throw our bodies backwards
till the door followed, then scuttle into a musty world nearly identical to that of the main level.
One single difference held us in its rapture: an ancient microfiche reader sat haunched in the far corner,
accompanied by three cardboard boxes of unorganized, unlabelled film rolls. We spent many hours
feeding random rolls into the machine and poring over newspaper and magazine articles from before our
parents were born.
To the right of the microfiche reader was what seemed like an oversized cupboard door that opened into
the electric dumbwaiter, which had always been the butt of many inside jokes between Gina and I. (We
couldn’t help giggling just speaking the word: “Dumb. Waiter!” Fits of laughter followed.) Its downstairs
door opened from behind the librarian’s desk. So of course we never got a chance to try our hands at
dumbwaiting.
I was twelve and Gina was thirteen when we first began to visit this library together, on autumn and spring
afternoons, riding our bicycles together after school. In the summer, we would enjoy the long walks from
our neighbourhoods. Being twelve meant two things for me: first, that my parents granted me more
independence than I had ever had before; I was allowed to explore the city so long as I had a friend with
me and had emergency telephone numbers memorized; second, it meant that I could have my very own
library card, with my very own name printed on it, with no limit on the number of books I could take out at
one time, and with a record of my very own over-due charges. Knowing what the answer would be, I asked
the old woman behind the counter for my overdue balance each time I took out a book. Still, I was strangely
disappointed when her squinting and quivering reply was “Zero dollars and zero cents.”
We hadn’t always come to this library. Our library trips began with a seventh grade challenge to visit every
one in the city. We were determined to win the challenge (the prize being a free book chosen from the
annual junior high book fair), so our bikes had quite a good work-out that week as we raced from library to
library to have a quick glance around and to collect the stamp from the librarian that was our evidence of
having been there. Most libraries were updated, well-kept, modern. This one was special because it was
old, dirty, and to us, mysterious.
With our appetite for mystery and fantasy, our first trip to this library had us in a fit of imagination as
provoked by the chain across the stairway, the screeches and bumps and creaks we conjured in our
minds, and the distant stares from the white-eyed librarian, the ones that made us grip each other’s arms
as shivers tore our spines. We spent an entire Friday night discussing this library, curled up in sleeping
bags on Gina’s bedroom floor, trading predictions about what kind of dangerous operations might be
taking place in the basement and what secret documents might be hidden under the peeling carpet. After
that night, we were addicted. We couldn’t stop going back to peer through the spaces between books,
watching the other people who used the library, our walkie-talkies beeping as we whispered to each other
from across the library. We loved to gaze down the stairs, willing the chain to shatter before our eyes. We
loved to feed microfiche into the old reader and try to find “evidence” from the Labour Page and the Women’
s Homemaking Column. And we loved to read the graffiti on the walls, as many words as could fill a book.
Eventually, when none of our gleeful suspicions could be confirmed, returning to the library became
something we did purely out of habit, and for the same reasons other people go to the library: to find
something to read. By the time that summer passed and we were in eighth grade, we returned solely to
look for books and magazines that piqued our interest. It was our tradition. It was what made our
friendship special to me.
A few months later, it was all over. Gina started making excuses about having to go straight home after
school, and I believed her until one day I went ahead to the library by myself and saw through the glass of
the IN door, then the OUT door, then the windows behind the check-out counter, Gina walking along with
three other girls from her class. My face fell. We had been placed in different classes that year, but I had
assumed that wouldn’t change our relationship.
I stopped asking Gina to go with me to the library. After awhile, we stopped seeing each other altogether
save for in the halls at school, where she would give me a half-hearted wave if I half-smiled at her first. I
couldn’t help getting the feeling that she had grown up, away from kiddy stuff like mystery, fantasy, and
reading. The library became my home away from home more than it ever had been before. Every day I
went straight there from school to immerse myself in the work of whichever author could spirit me away
from reality.
At eighteen, little had changed. I had a few friends, but it was impossible for me to become close with
them because none of them shared with me the past, present, and future encapsulated by my obsession
with my library, I didn’t think that they truly knew me. At the same time, I didn’t want to try to bring them
closer to me, because it would bring them closer to my library, the one thing outside of myself that at this
point in my life, I truly possessed. And so, I continued to isolate myself from the world, interested only in
forming bonds with the characters of my favourite novels, in tracing the strings of words in my favourite
poems, in glancing up from my reading and spying nonchalantly upon the library’s other occupants. This
was my life, in the words on these pages on these shelves.
Shutting the folding door to the phone booth behind me, I was shaking as I pressed a quarter and a dime
into the coinslot. I dialed the number with stiff fingers and looked out the glass panels into the slushy
streets where trucks, taxis and cars weaved lines of traffic honking and blinking impatient red circle lights
into the stern faces of the walkers, tall women in chunky black heels, picking their way through chunks of
snow, men in shiny brown shoes hugging their briefcases to their chests, hidden by layers of dress shirt,
tie, suit jacket, and matching outer shell, all in grey to match the filth spinning from under vehicle wheels.
None of them noticed the shivering people who weren’t walking or driving, because this street was their
home. One man with longish brown hair and the sprouts of a beard and moustache, a ripped green army
jacket, and fingerless gloves, was leaning against the sanctuary of the telephone booth, muttering. I heard
him from in here. “Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.” I noticed him, and I noticed the others, trying to be part of
the woodwork, just noticeable enough so that they might be taken pity upon and given a few coins or a half-
drunk latte from Starbucks. I think the others just pretended not to notice them: a flock of girls younger than
myself in a narrow alleyway, grossly underclothed for this kind of weather, and watched over hawkishly by
a pacing thirty-year-old man, tough-looking but with an appealing face; a pair of older men huddled
together under a holey forest green blanket on the stoop of a store closed for the night; “Amen. Amen.
Amen.”
“Hello?”
“Gina, it’s me.”
The sharp intake of breath confirmed that she recognized my voice even though after a moment of shock
she pulled on a mask and replied coldly, “I’m sure I don’t know who ‘me’ is.”
I sighed quickly, but indulged her. “It’s Riego. Gina, listen. I have something really important to talk to you
about -“
“Riego, if this is about the time…”
Incidentally, I didn’t know she had been behind that bout of cruelty in which many of the girls in my grade
got together and decided to try to drown my bike in the river. But my mind couldn’t deal with that right now
on top of the strange feeling that had crept up on me and was now spreading through my arteries with
every beat of my heart.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that; can you please just listen for a minute? I’ve been at the library today and -“
“Um, Riego, do we have to talk right now?” Gina asked abstractedly. “I have some place to be, people to
see…”
“No, Gina, don’t hang up!” I pleaded. “I need your help!”
My voice must have conveyed my earnestness and urgency enough to catch Gina’s attention, because she
sounded concerned, and kind of scared, when she spoke.
“What - what is it?” she stammered.
The day had been like any other except that when I came with Gina, we never used to go when it was
winter: the walk was too long and cold, and the snow was no good on our bicycles. I was planning on
doing some research for a final English paper I was writing on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. My high school
library didn’t have enough choice for sources, I told myself, doing as I often did, attempting to justify my
daily visits to my downtown library. I had been giving excuses ever since my mother had come to me,
worriedly asking if I was all right, if anything was wrong, which snowballed into why didn’t I have any close
friends, why didn’t I ever do anything, except go to that stupid library? I could never come up with any
reasonable answers, but my unreasonable attempts were enough to calm my own qualms about it. My
parents just had to deal, just had to exchange concerned looks across the dinner table when I was either
deathly silent or jabbering exuberantly about a quote I had come across in a book earlier in the day.
So when I slushed with my winter jacket and snow boots toward the IN door that afternoon, and it received
me anxiously, and the tiny myopic librarian peered at me over her glasses, all the same as usual. I had no
way to predict the air of the bizarre reality that would overcome me as I paced the aisles. There’s no way I
could have known that I would forget all about my research paper and resort to pretending to find books
when I was really keeping my eye on the strangeness that was going on around me.
After a pause and a brief glance around, I couldn’t help but feel that something wasn’t right. There was a
smell greater than usual of dust and must as if many of the books had recently been opened and left to air
out. None of the books seemed out of place, but as I approached the nearest shelf I realized that the white
card taped on the side, which usually indicated the number range based on the Dewey Decimal system,
instead bore a single capital letter in a cursive scrawl: R. Had the shelves been rearranged
alphabetically? And indeed, none of the usual books were on this shelf, but instead books about radios,
railroads, Sir Walter Raleigh and rape adorned the dented metal.
Curious, I went on to the next aisle, and stopped short when I found not S, but I. Ideology, internment
camps, and melting ice caps appeared here, but I was chilled with the knowledge that I followed R in my
name.
Too fearful to go on to the next aisle quite yet, I chose a book about Italy and cracked the spine. That’s
when I heard a crunch, followed by a blood-curdling scream.
I slammed the book shut, and immediately the scream stopped. Turning the book over in my hands to
investigate, I saw that the spine of the book’s cover no longer said “Italy” and was in fact not a book’s spine
at all. It was a spine of miniature bones, perhaps the size of a kitten’s back, now jagged and broken. The
book crumbled in my hands and fell to the floor in a light dust.
Gingerly, I chose another book from the shelf and held it lightly. It did not scream when I opened it. But,
flipping through, I was shocked and dismayed to find that all the pages were empty. More than frightened
for myself, I was frightened that my beloved words had fled.
Quickly, I retreated to the open and gazed down the row at the remaining shelves. E, G, O. I was not
surprised. Nor was I surprised that, when I checked them, the books on those shelves were blank as
well. That’s when I noticed that the librarian was not at her desk. I rushed over and examined the counter.
Like the books, it was empty. Where the old Mac check-out system was once set up, a single book lay
open to its final page.
I read the words from where I stood, upside-down, and I murmured them as my eyes traced the unfamiliar
curves of the letters.
“…and the choice was thus made for her. But it was believed that ultimately, she would have chosen the
same path for herself.”
The words caught in my throat and I jumped in surprise as a white head appeared from behind the
counter and the librarian raised herself to her feet, using the ledge for leverage.
“Just looking,” I said feebly, backing away from the knowing whites of her eyes.
I turned and broke through the stairwell door with the force of my entire body in motion, desperate to lose
the burning gaze that told me she somehow knew all the secrets of my soul.
To my left, there was a cement wall where once a simple chain and set of steps had inspired so many
stories in my heart and so many unanswered questions in my mind. I had to concede that I would never
visit the basement. Though I might sometime come to understand the general history of what once
happened there, I would never experience the torture, the abuse, the blood spilled, grim laughter.
Now, the stairs led only up. I was in the basement.
“Oh, Gina,” I sobbed, flinging my arms around her. “I’m so glad you came. I knew you would. I just knew
it.”
Gina held me and patted my back in comfort. “I had no choice,” she confided grimly. “I knew this day
would have to come.”
I sniffed and pulled away a little, looking at her in puzzlement. She ceased patting me. “What do you
mean?” I gulped. “How did you know?”
Gina drew in a deep breath and fixed me with apologetic eyes. “Listen, Riego…the reason I stopped
coming to the library isn’t what you think. The reason we stopped being friends isn’t what you think. I just –
“ She broke off.
“Well?” I demanded.
“I found out something about this library that I didn’t want to,” she said cryptically. Before I could protest for
her to expand, she raised a hand and rushed on. “Let me try to explain. I was never sure that what I found
out was true. But then you called me, and it all came rushing back to me, and I decided I couldn’t…I
couldn’t let you face it alone. And now I know it’s true.” Then, as if the next words explained everything that
had happened that day, she whispered conspiratorially, “I saw old Mr. Simlow on the way over here.”
“Mr. Simlow?” I cried in confusion. “Who’s Mr. Simlow? And what does he have to do with anything?”
“If you’ll just calm down and shut up,” Gina hissed, her eyes sorry for her having to speak so harshly, “I’ll
tell you everything.”
I was taken aback at first, but I closed my eyes briefly, then nodded. Gina gave a responding nod, then led
me to the table and chairs in the children’s section, which stood about a foot off the ground, but we sat
there together, our knees far above the seats of the chairs and our hands folded upon the table.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Mr. Simlow. We’ll start with him. I’m surprised you don’t remember…but oh well,
all that matters is…oh, Riego, he was our seventh grade teacher. Can’t you remember? He’s the one
who came up with the whole library relay thing that went on that year. Don’t you see? It was a trap! For
us! Mr. Simlow knew that we two were the only ones in the class who would actually go around to all the
libraries, including this one. He planned it, Riego…he wanted us to keep coming back here.”
“But how did you –“
Gina hushed me quietly. “It was an off-hand comment my mom said one day. She asked me how I liked
the library that was the newest in the city, and I asked her which one was that, because yes I had been to
all of them, but that was months ago, and so many of them were clean and pretty and new-smelling. And
she looked at me, surprised, and said, silly, it’s the one you go to all the time, every day. Turns out she
had just read some article in the paper about the city’s newest library, and the address it gave was the
address of…of this library! It made sense to her then that we would travel so far just to go to a stupid
library, because if it were the newest, it would be the freshest, the best library of all, with scores of new
books just itching to be read by eager children like us! I mumbled something, then ran to my room, and
thought about it, and wanted to call you, but I couldn’t. Please, don’t ask me why, Riego. I’ll never know
that. I scared myself into thinking two things: one, that it was true, and that something very very strange
was happening at this library, because it was obviously so old and decrepit and disgustingly musty, not
new at all. So that’s why I didn’t want to go back. And then secondly, that it wasn’t true, that the paper had
just printed the wrong address, and that’s why I didn’t tell you, because I thought you would think that they
were wrong, and you would want to keep going. Or that you would think they were right and would want to
keep going, just to investigate it. And I was spooked, Riego! I still have books that I never brought back,
years overdue now; Ray Bradbury and Stephen King and R.L. Stine; I consumed that kind of horror back
then, from kiddie stuff to grown-up stuff, and it scared me out of my mind! I threw those books under my
bed, and there they’ve stayed; they gave me ideas about this place, made me think it was haunted with
creatures that would rip my heart out and suck my brain out through my ear.
“And moreso than that, Riego…I was, well…I was scared of you.”
She paused from her rant, and I stared at her a moment, before my face fell. How could she be scared of
me? I was no monster! And I had no desire to eat hearts and brains; my only desires were to read! to
learn! to know! and to come here, to the only place where I ever belonged.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully, shaking her head now. “I don’t know. It’s just that, well . . .
you were always into the whole library thing more than I was. You came up with the most creative ideas of
what could be going on down there in the basement –“ I shivered, knowing now what was really going on
down there “– and it made me think that anything you said could be true. Because when you talked about
it, or wrote about it, it came to life in my mind. Your exquisite descriptions, your precise and daunting
words…they scared me. I thought that maybe, somehow, you could make things happen here.”
“But what about Mr. Simlow!” I protested. “If you knew it was him, why would you blame me?”
“I didn’t know that back then,” she explained quickly. “That’s something I only figured out today when I saw
him. And I knew when you called me that you were in trouble. It couldn’t be you. It was…well, I haven’t
figured that part out. All I know is that, whatever we said in those days about this library, it was all true. We
were right about this place.”
My heart hammering against my ribcage, I leaned my back against a shelving unit that stood next to the
dumbwaiter against the wall. It was just as wide as the others even though it couldn’t be accessed from
both sides, so its placement against the wall was awkward. But the library was so crammed with shelves
that it just wouldn’t have fit anywhere else. These thoughts, which had skimmed undetected across the
surface of my brain for perhaps years, now developed themselves fully, trying to distract me. I brushed
them away and tried to concentrate by breathing in slowly through my nose, out through my mouth, and
closing my eyes.
An inconstant humming next to my ear overpowered the usual humming of the overhead lights, and my
eyes snapped open. The sound continued so that I could feel its light tickly vibrations against my ears,
their tiny hairs standing up, reaching out to the diapason of intangible notes, strung together brilliantly and
yet, in some strange and stirring way, terribly. In the slowest motion I could make, I twisted to face the
noise with my eyes, as if I could somehow then hear it better, or at least discover its mystical source.
I jumped! With a stifled scream, I clapped my hands over my mouth, and the humming grew louder in a
distressed manner; my scream had evidently upset him, and his eyes were squeezed shut, whereas
when I had taken in my first glimpse of his face, they were curiously wide, and grey-blue in their
innocence. The man, swaddled tightly in a multitude of white sheets, his head the only visible part of his
body, was lying, childlike, on the top shelf. The little wrinkles around his clenched eyes looked like tiny
spindles of lightning, fearful of me, and fierce in their intensity.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, taking a tentative step toward the shelving unit. “I’m sorry; it’s okay.” I spoke as if
molly-coddling a child, but my words felt misdirected. I was unsure of myself. He, on the other hand,
continued humming, but a little quieter now. “It’ll be all right,” I continued, trying to sound less
condescending. “Don’t you worry.”
I rested the tips of my fingers on the edge of the top shelf to show him that I carried no threat, and
mustered enough courage to look straight into his closed eyelids and wonder what was underneath, and
what was underneath that, what lay at the very core of his being. My curiosity was not forced by the
questions that had gripped me just a few moments before. It was starved, instead, by an inexplicable
attraction to not only this man’s muffled voice now, but also to him as a whole, his body, his head, his
indiscernibly encased mind, and the spirit which continued to transcend his unceasing music.
I went back to my breathing exercises to calm my pounding heart. I managed to speak once more. “What’
s your name?” I whispered audibly.
His humming slowed when I spoke, as though he wanted to hear me better. When I repeated myself
patiently, he opened one big, frightened eye, and ceased his song. He seemed to size me up with that
one eye, but not as the librarian had always done. His was an honest gaze, swooping down to my toes
smoothly, not jerkily, then up my legs, my knees, my thighs, my stomach, my chest, my neck, my face.
When he met my eyes, both his grey-blue eyes were open, and I could see the sensitivity that coupled with
his judgment, which wanted me to be, hoped that I was, a friend.
Placing my chin on the shelf near his face, I told him quietly, “My name’s Riego.”
Did I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes when I said my name, or was it my overactive, perhaps wishful,
imagination? I looked closer. My face only a foot away from his, I saw that he was much younger than I had
originally thought; he was maybe in his early twenties. His face was round and very white as though it had
never seen the light of day, his head smooth and devoid of hair. Two sparse, pale eyebrows knit
themselves together above his lightly-lashed eyes. A pair of thin, pink lips now parted just slightly as
though he was considering in that incomprehensible head of his the consequences of speaking to me.
Just looking at him, I somehow knew his story; I could see everything that had happened in his life playing
through my head, a film of horror and tragedy. He was not just any random person, and he wasn’t here for
just any random reason. He was the librarian’s son. Her paleness had been passed on to him, though his
eyes were so, so alive, not dead like hers. She had borne him late in life, in her mid-fifties, along with a
fraternal twin sister. Scarlett, her name was, and she was incredibly beautiful, with thick auburn locks and
a smiling pink face with dark green-brown speckled eyes. I could see her as a child in my mind, stooping
over her dear brother, who could not yet walk or talk, and mopping his forehead with a wet rag. He had a
fever, high in the hundreds. Mama wouldn’t come take care of him, even when Scarlett told her that he had
been retching all over the basement floor. Mama didn’t care.
Scarlett tried to entertain her brother by singing beautiful songs as she coaxed him to drink water and
tucked and re-tucked the few ragged blankets she had tighter around his body as he thrashed and cried in
delirium. She could read music, miraculously, as well as words, and all the songs she sang came from
books that she snuck from the top floor of the library. The door to the stairs was always locked, but the
dumbwaiter was never blocked; Scarlett thought maybe Mama believed it to be broken because she never
used it. So she climbed into the dumbwaiter and reached her hand out to press the button, and was able
to move up and down through the building with complete freedom, so long as Mama didn’t see. She was
hard of hearing, so the clunking and braying of the machine was no problem, but she could see
everything, even though her eyes were white and glazed. Consequently, Scarlett never stopped on the
main floor where Mama usually stayed.
Before he got sick, Scarlett taught him how to read. He couldn’t read aloud because he couldn’t speak,
but she could tell by the way his eyes lit up as they scanned the pages that he understood each word.
Mama visited them once each day with bits of food, the majority of which she forced Scarlett to consume
while he watched, freckles of saliva speckling his lips. She rarely spoke, just looked from one child to the
other, often shaking her head slowly, but sometimes nodding to herself.
During the time when he was ill, Scarlett was taken away by her mother. Though Mama returned day after
day, once each day, Scarlett never came back. He cried silently for weeks, humming the songs his sister
once sang to him. After many days had passed, he stole into the dumbwaiter to look for books. Books
were his only haven, his only medicine. For he was still sick, though not with a fever, but sick of heart,
which had once had the courage to live when it was loved by another little person, but which now was truly
and utterly alone.
“What’s your name?” I repeated.
He regarded me and quivered, then raised his eyebrows slightly. “Ahman.”
When he spoke, the scattered books on the shelf below his makeshift bed murmured in a rifling of curled,
yellowed pages, a chill breeze of emptiness disturbing their chapters, their justified words. They were
books that had once been on the main floor of the library. I had read them all before: Jane Eyre, Sophie’s
Choice, The Phantom of the Opera.
“Ahman,” I repeated simply, testing the word on my tongue.
The mystery of the library had disappeared for me. Or rather, it had displaced itself onto this strange white
ghost of a man. I no longer cared for finding the becauses of the whys that had sprung on the main floor,
pirouetting up the stairs from the basement, somersaulting through the aisles, swinging from and
dissipating the hanging lights. The only answer was a peace that ascended me when I looked into the
face of someone new and accepting.
Bracing myself, I tested with my right foot the stability of the bottom shelf. Very slowly, I lifted my other foot
off the floor and put all my weight onto my right. Though the rack groaned quietly, it held, and I climbed. A
few shelves from my goal, I slid my right knee on to the top, then my left. Ahman watched me intently as I
shifted over him and knelt between him and the wall, beside his torso. I leaned forward, my legs curled up
to my chest, and rested my cheek against his. I could feel his jaw moving; he spoke my name aloud.
“Riego.”
I raised my head and neck, and looked into his eyes, softening into trust as I reached with my hands and
stroked his face gently, brushed against his eyelashes, drew circles with my palm on his head. Feeling
the clammy cold of his skin warming under my redly throbbing hands comforted my mind, slowed my
heart. Encouraged, I drew my fingers along his neck and placed my palms on the sheets at his chest.
Their fluffy lightness, as if concealing pillows of air, suggested that more sheets wrapped him than I might
have guessed. I pressed gingerly down into them, and they began to compress beneath my pressure. My
hands frenzied themselves then to find his body, and they collapsed the sheets entirely until the cool, flat
metal of the shelf below could be felt through the muffling material. I looked to Ahman’s detached and lone
face; still his eyes watched me, now crinkled in concern as my heart skipped and I collapsed into a tearful
release.
A lone sob wailed from my throat, defying my attempts to keep my crying under control. With the blood-
warm tears trickling down my cheeks, into my nostrils and the corners of my lips, I felt a desperate,
lonesome longing, though I could not tell what for. The endless moments of pure despair were
interrupted by the weight of a hand on each of my shoulders. Calmed yet suspicious, I shuddered a last
weeping breath before opening my eyes.
“It all seems so clear now,” I whispered, stitching together in my mind all the fragments of what had once
been kicks and thrills, and was now a shrill reality.
Mr. Simlow. He, too, had once been obsessed with this library. He had visited it daily, reading books for
hours, and scribbling intriguing quotes he discovered on to the library walls so he could share them with
the people merely passing through, making them read as he made his students read. It was better than
going home to an empty, blank-walled apartment every afternoon after work.
The words he wrote on the walls were read most often by the librarian, a little younger then, and he had
planted a seed of an idea in her at least, even if he may have failed with each passerby and each student.
By day, he would sometimes climb the stairs and find a corner by the shelf along the wall to read from his
favourite books and masturbate, wishing he lived in a book instead of his mundane life. He loved the
library so much, he made sweaty love to it in his dreams at night.
The librarian watched Mr. Simlow. She knew that he wrote on her walls, she knew that he left his semen
on her bookshelves upstairs. She knew he came here to escape the walls of loneliness at home. But to
her, these library walls were her own walls of loneliness. She hated Mr. Simlow for making her sacred
lonely walls into friends that talked to him and protected him. But she loved him for talking to her through
the walls. The walls needn’t be so lonely after all.
The products of their strange, unspoken love affair were Scarlett and Ahman.
When Mr. Simlow first saw the telltale bump on the librarian, he left that day and went straight to a used
book store. There he bought as many books as he could afford, piled them in precarious towers all
around his empty blank-walled apartment, and never returned to the library. He wrote on his own walls
until they were grey instead of white and the words were all indiscernable from one another.
Now in his dreams, the library followed him home and swallowed him up.
The librarian wanted the children never to leave as her lover had.
Mr. Simlow found the auburn curls of Scarlett hard with the dried blood from her slit throat shining on his
doorstep years later. Cursive words cut into her calves read, “Look what your son did to my daughter.”
“He wanted to set his son free from that torture chamber,” Gina gulped.
“That’s when he came up with the idea for the library relay race,” I guessed, shivering that he would use us
so.
He would never be able to get in to Ahman without having his throat slit as Scarlett’s was by their
omniscient mother. So he had to send us instead. Mr. Simlow had as keen an eye as the librarian did,
and he knew that Gina and I would fall in love with the library as he had: the books, the intrigue.
And that was exactly what Mr. Simlow needed. Firstly, in order to keep Ahman alive and away from the
blind wrath of his mother, he had to ensure that someone, namely me, and Gina, visited the library on a
regular basis, as he had. The familiarity and the love-hate relationship had kept her relatively sane.
Secondly, he realized that the key to breaking the spell the librarian had over Ahman that kept him locked
inside was to physically blind her. And yet with her bizarre magic, only another brand of magic would
overpower her.
The only way to blind the librarian so Ahman could escape was for someone to afford him the same love
and dignity that Scarlett once did, for whoever loved him did so fearlessly, considering Scarlett’s bloody
murder by their mother.
Eventually, coming to love Ahman was simply an extension of having the courage to keep coming back to
the library, of loving the library.
“Riego, let’s leave while we can,” Gina urged me.
I just stared at her with blank eyes, still trying to take in the meaning of all the love, hatred, fear, and
emptiness.
“The librarian is blind now, Riego. Ahman is gone, and we can get out, too.”
The love, hatred, fear, and emptiness. It was my own.
Gina tugged at my arm, but I pulled back hard, almost knocking her over.
“Riego! You have to let go of this place!”
My eyes still did not see her. My ears heard her words, but they merely echoed inside my brain. They were
meaningless. Like the blank pages of all those books. Couldn’t we start the story over now? Rewrite it
ourselves? Or were we the authors already…
“Oh, Riego!” I heard Gina running towards the stairs. But she found only that the door had disappeared,
and only wall remained.
She would go crazy trying to escape…
Then I snapped out of it.
“Gina! Not the dumbwaiter!” I tried to grab her arm as she raced past me towards the dumbwaiter door.
“I knew I shouldn’t have come back!” she yelled, breaking away from me, and tearing open the door.
“Gina, not the dumbwaiter,” I sobbed. “It goes to the basement. It’s not safe.”
Ignoring me, she threw her body into the dark hole.
I was sure I heard Gina’s shriek as she plummeted through the empty shaft, the deafening crack as her
skull hit the cement floor at full impact, Scarlett’s sweet song trying to revive Gina’s lifeless body.
But she must have escaped. I have read the story of her life a number of times before, in this very library. I
even read it today. She would be a great writer, director, and producer of films. She would tell my story
through a medium that has little or nothing to do with books.
“Thank you, Gina,” I whispered.
Then it hit me that I was so very alone, as I recalled the closeness of the friendship Gina and I once
shared, and the closeness of spirit and kinship as Ahman’s cool skin brushed gently against mine.
Ahman’s eyes were inspecting me closely; his hands were on me; one of them brushed some stray wet
hair from my face then returned warmly to my shoulder. I opened my eyes more. He had unswathed his
naked body, the thick sheets bunching under his back and legs, though how he had done so without arms
– I believed I must have imagined that no flesh had been attached to his neck. I was so relieved that
whatever had just happened, imagination or not, had not happened, that I slid into tears again.
He held my body close beside his now-tangible one with his strong, round limbs and tenderly placed a
finger on each tear stain until it dissipated, magically, into his skin, away from mine. “I’m sorry,” he
murmured in a fragile yet husky voice in my ear, the same ear that had first heard his former humming.
“Hush now. It’ll be all right; don’t you worry.”
I opened my eyes to him. “You’re here?” I breathed urgently.
His lips knotted into a frail smile. “We are here,” he corrected me, then kissed my forehead peacefully until
my eyes wilted and I somehow rested, beside this cool, pale entity who spoke my name with conviction,
above all the books that had kept me company for so many years, on the top shelf, in this plebeian library
of the downtown core, this haven and bank of knowledge, this haunted relic of corruption and dangerous
secrets.
“Ahman. Ahman. Ahman,” I wept as my ears succumbed to the cautionary clanking of the dumbwaiter
retreating in the wall behind me. I thought of him, brave and hopeful, climbing out of the dumbwaiter,
approaching the OUT door downstairs, and, drawing in a deep breath, stepping outside into the world he
had read so much about that he undoubtedly knew more of its knowns and unknowns than anyone who
had tread its grounds for as many years.
My heart froze. I had forgotten to tell him…the evils and fears of this library…the evils and fears out there…
We would be in the same place forever.
More fiction in this issue:
Counting Down the Storm
Stoners
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our ultimate goal of paying all the artists
who contribute to the magazine, as well
as to improve the website and build the
infrastructure necessary to further unite
art and activism in the Calgary
community. If you like the magazine
and the values it stands for, please feel
welcome to contribute.
Equally important is to get the word out.
Advertising is expensive, and the best
advertising is by word of mouth. If you
like the magazine, or any content in
particular, please take a few moments
to share the link with your friends.
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