The Library

“’Scuse me?” The boy was barely tall enough to see over the desk. His coat had once been brightly coloured but any such vibrance had long since been worn away as it was handed down from one sibling to the next.

Eadgar continued with his patient cataloguing, lost in the dark, wandering shelves of a library that existed only in his imagining.

“’Scuse? Mister?”

His finger touched the faded gilt of one spine and then another. Works long lost to scholarship and memory were safely enshrined in the catacombs of Eadgar’s mind. A binding had come loose, and he gently pushed it into place to read the title; The History of Cardenio. He smiled with the quiet assurance of one whose great work is nearly done.

“Mister. Have you got anything about myths?” The sentence was a mangled remnant of “‘aves” and “miffs”, and Eadgar could bare it no more. This feckless urchin, this degenerate indolent had torn him back from the Library of Lost Works into a world of peeling floor tiles, florescent lighting and the horrors of Bookz-4-Kidz!

He turned his chair and rose in a single motion. “We do, indeed, have works on myth,” he emphasised the th like a bad impression of a snake. “But not, alas, the Khwātay-Nāmag or Cassiodorus's Gothic History, for they are lost on the shores of memory and regret, cast adrift in the…. Oh.” Now that Eadgar was closer to the desk and saw his questioner directly, irritation turned to indignation. He had been called from his work for such a one as this.

He tapped his glasses against his lips and stared across the desk with what he probably thought was a haughty expression.

“Show me.” He held out his hand. His long, over-manicured hands demanding an offering from the feckless supplicant.

Jeremy, who wanted everyone to call him Jex but knew they’d laugh at him, handed over the slip of paper. He had been winding it tightly round a biro on the way and Eadgar unrolled the cylinder with all the joy he might reserve for moving the suppurating carcass of a rat from under a floorboard.

“Oh, what an undiluted joy,” Said Eadgar, each word flatter than the last, “Medusa. What a complete and total surprise. Pray, what ghastly festering nonsense do you hope to pluck forth from, as the Bard might have it, so great a monument?”

“I didn’t do it.” Almost-Ready-To-Be-Jex had no idea what Eadgar was talking about, but incomprehension triggered his basic survival mechanism.

“Didn’t do what, you tiresome miscreant. I haven’t so much as uttered even the most genteel of accusations, let alone any reprimand. Although I have little doubt one would be very much in order.” Eadgar attempted to loom over the desk, a technique he’d been practicing with the collapsible breakfast-bar-slash-computer-desk in his bedsit. He had focussed much of his effort on staring imperiously over the arch of his nose.

Jeremy-Who-Would-Be-Jex watched in horror. The man appeared to be attempting to weaponise his eyeballs and fire them like snot rockets out of each nostril. But it wasn’t enough. Almost-Jex had four older brothers and the value of establishing beyond doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that he was in no way responsible for acts that may or may not have been committed by persons currently unknown, had been seared into his soul from birth. “Nothing!” He exploded, “I didn’t do nothing!”

The assault on his senses was too much for Eadgar. He should have been sipping sharbat on the terraces in Alexandria after a morning in the archives or gently chiding the scholars of Al-Qarawiyyin for leaving their desks untidy when they left for prayers. Instead, he was here, trying to unpick his library from this obviously feral child. He extended a long, accusatory finger over the desk and threw down the challenge that adults have made of unknown and unkempt children since the dawn of civilisation: “What is your name?”

Time slowed, stretching each syllable until they wrapped around Jeremy, squeezing his true self out and into the world.

“My name is Jex!”

As he said it, the universe rose up with him, hung for moment in the void and then crashed back into reality, smashing timelines and the boundaries of worlds into a deluge of temporal shards and cosmic splinters.

The library had been the centre of the blast. The walls of reality were already thin; tired and stretched by years of readers teasing at them and tugging at the seams. Libraries are like tinder boxes, stacked high with ageing sheafs of mental images and countless maps of imagined worlds. The clash of wills had simply provided the spark.

Eadgar and Jex stood up by the shattered wreckage of the desk. Their reality hung loosely around them, shredded and fluttering in an unfelt breeze.

Between a tattered curtain containing Gardening and DIY and another that held what little was left of Wellbeing and Health, a whale leapt out of a vast ocean and crashed back down with a huge plume of spray. Through another rent, an immaculate garden rolled on to the horizon in geometrical perfection. Through another, a barn sat silently, the burning of a distant village barely visible through its open door.

The librarian raced between the gaps, some large enough for a car to drive through, others so small he had to press his face against them and peer through.

It had to be here; he knew it.

Spaceships, battlefields, submarines, castles and palaces, ballrooms and stables. Where was it? There had to be the library.

As he rushed, he noticed a sound; a sticky, scratching sound like tiny claws skittering on a polished floor. Stitching! The tears were repairing themselves, knotting together into invisible joins. He looked across and could again see almost all of Travel Guides and Phrasebooks, where there had been a gladiators’ training school just a few minutes before. A forest world that he had seen only moments ago had completely vanished.

“Mister?”

He span around. The boy! He had completely forgotten about the child.

But the boy who stood there was changed. While Eadgar had been examining, Jex had clearly been exploring. He was dressed in armour, which included among other things a frying pan, chainmail and one, massive robotic hand. “This what you looking for?”

There by the desk, where Eadgar had spent so many hours building it, the Library of Lost Works peered out at him. He stepped towards the thin tear and, as he did so, Jex stood aside, holding back the whole world like the flap of a tent. Eadgar burned to step through but knew that something more was expected of him.

“Errrm. Where will you go now…errrm?”

“Jex Who Done Nothing.”

Eadgar nodded and looked again at the armoured warrior, regarding him now as an equal. “Where will you go now, Jex Who Done Nothing? Will you tally here or journey again into the dark?”

“I cannot rest, I dare not.” Replied Jex, pulling a phaser from behind the frying pan and gesturing with it towards one of the spacecraft rifts. In the same moment, a tattoo appeared on one cheek over what looked like fake stubble applied with a sponge, “The Huntsman is just steps behind me and I must drive the white star rhino herd to the safety of the Great Grey Nebula.”

Eadgar placed a hand on the armoured shoulder, “Safe travels, Jex. May your blaster bring peace to a thousand worlds.”

With a simple nod of farewell, each left the library and stepped into the universe.

List of images

Book Vortex create by PublicDomainImages found on Pixabay.

Old Books created by Michal Jarmoluk and found on Pixabay.

Diagonal Books is created by Pexels and found on Pixabay.

Tops of Books is created by Natalia Yakovleva and found on Unsplash.

Library Ladder is created by Henry Be on Unsplash.