Chapter 8: The Library
Later, when he was dressed comfortably in factory-fresh underwear, navy blue sweats, and athletic socks, they took the elevator up to the ground floor. The basement hallway from the safe room to the elevator was utilitarian, with off-white walls and beige industrial carpeting. The hallway they entered when they stepped out of the elevator looked like it belonged to someone too wealthy to even want their home featured in Architectural Digest. The hardwood floors shone with an incredible luster. The long, skinny rug—it looked Persian to his untrained eye—running down the center of the hall might have cost his annual salary or ten times as much. Twelve-foot ceilings, crown molding that would not have looked out of place at Versailles, and gorgeous wainscoting only added to the feeling that he was far from the world he knew. The robin’s egg blue walls held framed engravings at regular intervals. Adelaide, or perhaps her interior decorator, had a fondness for Albrecht Dürer.
Amy led him through the entry hall and past a cathedral-sized front door. A grand staircase that should have featured Vivien Leigh in a hoop skirt dominated the space, and a chandelier that might have decorated a Viennese opera house hung above. Another door took them down yet another hallway. Kirby’s mind stopped taking in the details of this alien landscape. It was too much. Perhaps, in the future, he might be able to wrap his head around the notion, to truly accept as a fact, that unnatural things existed. It was not entirely impossible, given what he had seen, that sorcery might be real. The reality of how the truly wealthy lived, however, might be a more difficult concept for his mind to allow. Before they even reached the library, his brain had given up trying.
An image of the library had been building in his mind since Adelaide had first mentioned it. This image was composed of various rich people’s libraries that he had seen in movies and on television. Even in comparison to Hollywood’s finest, Adelaide’s library did not disappoint. Shelves of polished wood stretched from floor to ceiling on three walls of the room. Rolling ladders on brass rails were present. Three rectangular mahogany tables dominated the center of the room. The fourth wall held large windows and a pair of French doors. Decadently upholstered armchairs in mahogany leather sat in pairs near the windows, flanked by ornate side tables. Decorative pedestals supported busts of men and women that Kirby was not certain he recognized.
Under normal circumstances, the thousands of volumes lining the shelves would have drawn him with the irresistibility of a lodestone. Today’s circumstances, however, did not meet the criteria for normality. He felt drained and walked to the nearest of the armchairs, managing not to stumble or stagger, before dropping heavily into it.
Amy, watching his slightly unsteady walk across the room, said, “Yeah, you’re gonna be weak for a while. I’m healing you as fast as I can, but you really got fucked up. It’s gonna take some time to get you back up to full strength.”
“You might have warned me,” he accused, but without much energy. “I could have fallen and hurt myself.”
“Um, hello? Doctor here! Also: sorceress! You’d have been fine.”
“You’re only an apprentice, I’ve been told,” he riposted, again without much zip to his thrust.
“Well, this apprentice just saved your ass from a lot worse. After fixing that, I think I could handle it if you fell down and got a boo-boo.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“Whatever,” she agreed, hopping into the chair nearest his.
She was lithe, agile, crossing her legs before she had even landed on the cushion. The big chair gave her plenty of room to sit Indian style. He wondered, briefly, how she could move so easily in the skinny jeans she wore, but he just marked it down as one of the things that someone with thighs as thick as his would never understand. Skinny jeans did not come in his size and the jeans that did were made of heavy denim that bunched uncomfortably at the backs of his knees if he tried to sit as she did now. His hips touched both sides of the chair, but you could have fit three Amys on it—if they did not sit Indian-style.
“Do me a favor and close your eyes,” she told him.
“What? Why?”
“Just humor me,” she said, adding, “Doctor’s orders.”
“Yeah. Okay. Whatever.”
“No peeking!” The little smile on her face made her look unbelievably mischievous.
“Whatever.” He raised his hand to cover his eyes. “Satisfied?”
“That’s good,” she said. “One sec… Okay, you can open ‘em.”
When he uncovered his eyes, he immediately detected motion to his left. Near the door through which they had entered, a burgundy cord was swaying to and fro, as if it had been very recently disturbed. The bottom of the cord ended in a golden tassel and the other end disappeared into a hole near the ceiling.
“Is that a bell pull?” he asked.
“Yep,” she said.
“But how did you…?” He looked at her, at the little smile still on her face. “Sorcery?”
“Yep,” she repeated.
“You used sorcery to, what, ring for a servant because you didn’t want to get up?” he asked incredulously, the idea of ringing for a servant only slightly less impossible than using sorcery to ring for one.
“Hey, I just got comfortable,” she retorted, “and I didn’t want for you to have to do it; you’re still recovering.”
“Ugh! Why does it seem like this conversation is going to wind up in crazy town?”
The library door opened and a servant wearing the same uniform as the women who had waited on him downstairs appeared. “We’ll take tea in here, Suzanne,” Amy told her. The woman nodded and departed, presumably to fetch tea.
“Okay. Now, while we wait for the tea, tell me why you had me close my eyes.”
“It’s just easier.”
“Easier...to do sorcery?”
“Exactly.”
“Easier because you have, what, performance anxiety? You don’t seem the type to me.” She only rolled her eyes a little before she held her hands up in front of her and began. “Okay. Miss Adelaide told me to answer your questions, so I’m going to give this a shot. You,” and she pointed at him, “are going to be the first person I,” and she cocked her thumb back at herself, “get to try to explain this to. Everybody else,” she made a circling gesture with her finger to indicate, possibly, every other living being on the planet, “that I’ve ever discussed it with has already known about it.”
“And we’re talking about the stuff Miss Adelaide says I should call sorcery, the stuff you used just now to pull the bell cord, right?”
“That’s the stuff.”
“I’m all ears,”
She snorted. “Hardly! You’re mostly beard and body fur, but your ears’ll do. So,” she emphasized the word with a two-handed gesture, “tell me what you know about U.F.O.’s.” Hastily, she slashed a finger across the air and cut off the words about to come out of his mouth. “No. Don’t even ask it. Sorcery does NOT come from U.F.O.’s. I’m making an analogy.”
He kept his mouth closed but nodded to acknowledge her point. He had been going to make a semi-snide comment to that effect.
“Alright,” she continued, “I could have phrased that better. I’ll try again. Where do people who claim to get abducted by U.F.O.’s tend to get abducted?” With her hands she mimed a person getting sucked upward into a flying saucer.
“Arkansas?”
“By which I assume you mean, generally, B.F.E., the middle of fucking nowhere, right?” She waited for him to nod before continuing. “Why doesn’t anyone claim to have been abducted by U.F.O.’s while they’re at game seven of the World Series?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Because, if that had happened, then eighty or ninety thousand people in the stadium would have seen it, not to mention the millions on T.V. The abductee wouldn’t have to ‘claim’ to have been abducted. Everyone would already know what had happened and already believe his story when he told it.”
“So,” she said with a half-smile, “if we imagine that U.F.O’s were a real thing—and as far as I know they’re not, but I could be wrong—and that they made a habit of abducting people, then there might bet something that forces them to avoid the notice, the attention, of large numbers of people and that’s why they’re always abducting rednecks from the B.F.E. places, like Arkansas, instead of Wall Street brokers who can afford World Series tickets. That theory, the one I just made up about U.F.O.’s, is actually kind of like how sorcery works. Dude, is this making any sense?”
“Keep going and we’ll see,” he told her. “I know you’re trying here, and I respect that, but if you ask me to comment now, I’ll probably say something stupid, like ‘So, sorcery is like U.F.O.’s because they’re both shy?’”
“That’s reasonable. I mean, it’s a little stupid, but that was the point I was trying to make. I’ve got no idea if U.F.O.s are real, but I know magic, or sorcery, or whatever name you want to give it, is real and that it is ‘shy’. It doesn’t want to be seen and people don’t want to see it. Seeing it fucks with people’s sense of reality.”
“I wish I hadn’t seen the thing that landed me here. It absolutely fucked with my sense of reality.”
“Yeah, I got introduced to all of this stuff gently and in small doses—and it still freaked me out. You got your cherry popped—so to speak—by Long Dong Silver! Ouch!”
He discovered that he liked watching her talk. Her hands fluttered, miming and emphasizing her words. They were never still as she spoke. The closed-fist gesture she made when expressing the idea of Long Dong Silver popping his cherry almost made him laugh aloud, even though the violation she was suggesting would have been no laughing matter. The slender doctor he had first met had been tremendously cute, but this animated Amy was attractive on another level entirely.
“So, in your metaphor, what’s my cherry and how did it get popped?” Asking people to explain their metaphors was directly in his wheelhouse as an English teacher.
“That,” she said, pointing at him with both her index fingers, “is exactly the question I wanted you to ask. Your cherry is your belief that reality doesn’t include sorcery or,” and she redirected both of her pointing fingers to orient upon his right hand, “unnatural things.”
“And seeing those wolf-things…” He did not bother to finish.
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “But that’s not enough to really pop it. Seeing something unnatural might freak you out and make you believe for a while but, given a chance, your mind will forget bits of it and rationalize the rest away. Plus, it seems to be part of the true nature of reality to minimize most people’s awareness of so-called unnatural things and sorcerous stuff.”
“Why—and I mean ‘why does the true nature of reality’ do this? I think I might already get why the human mind might want to rationalize some things away or forget them.”
A quiet knock announced the imminent arrival of tea. The library door opened and the woman from earlier, Suzanne, entered with a tray. She placed it on the table between their two armchairs. “Will that be all?” she asked Amy.
The tray held a porcelain teapot, two teacups on saucers—each with its own silver teaspoon—cream, sugar, and a plate stacked with a pyramid of Lorna Doones. He noticed Amy nodding to dismiss the servant out of the corner of his eye, but he could not take his eyes off the tea set. “I see somebody’s a fan of a certain little black duck.”
The white porcelain tea set looked like an antique, like it belonged in a museum. It was white, with the classic lines and features of European porcelain from centuries ago. The cups, saucers, teapot, and creamer were decorated with delicate flowers, buds, vines, leaves, and Daffy Duck. On the side of the teapot facing him, Daffy peeked from behind the flowers. On the creamer, he appeared to be hacking through the vegetation with a machete. Kirby lifted the teacup nearest him and saw Daffy hanging upside down by one foot from a vine and, on the saucer beneath, Daffy had taken a bite out of one of the flowers and had a mouthful—er, bill-full—of petals. The effect was incongruous, yet entirely authentic somehow.
“Is this sorcery?” he asked, astounded, far more in awe than he had been at her pulling the bell cord from across the room.
“Ha! No!” She laughed. “This,” she indicated the tea set, “is what happens when you’re friends with someone who has as much money as Miss Adelaide, it’s your birthday, you’re a Daffy Duck fan, and you like tea.”
“This is incredible!” His mouth hung open as he studied the workmanship.
“But not impossible. Oh and, in case you were wondering, twenty unique place settings’ worth of china in this pattern, isn’t sorcery, either. Trust me on this. Put your cup down, so I can pour. Miss Adelaide said she had it made for me to remind me that a sorceress must always remember that the unnatural and the sorcerous are there, like Daffy on the tea set, even if most people only ever see the flowers.”
“Okay,” he said, “back to that, then. Why does what you called ‘the true nature of reality’ try to lessen people’s awareness of unnatural stuff?”
“Well, that’s the big question isn’t it? Nobody seems to know,” she admitted.
“Then how do you know that it—”
“Look, just because the architects of reality didn’t leave us their notes doesn’t mean that we can’t try to figure this stuff out on our own. That’s what sorcery is all about. Miss Adelaide defines sorcery as ‘using reason and experimentation to better understand and manipulate reality'. We know from a series of well-documented experiments going back centuries that nature ‘pushes back’ against the unnatural. Sorcery can warp reality, but reality doesn’t seem to like it. The greatest push-back occurs when you try to do sorcery while being witnessed by people who haven’t had their cherry popped, their view of reality altered by having already encountered the unnatural. The more people who are there to witness it, the more power and skill it takes to make sorcery happen.”
“So, sorcery on the pitcher’s mound at the World Series is never going to happen, then?”
“It’s very unlikely—and if anyone ever had enough power to make something like that happen, the minds of the people who witnessed it would reach desperately for an alternate explanation. They’d convince themselves that there was a totally natural explanation for whatever just happened.”
“Because it’s easier to believe that it’s swamp gas or a rogue weather balloon than it is to believe in little green men from Mars paying us a visit,” he reasoned.
“Now you’re getting it.” She placed her cup back down on its saucer—but not before he noticed Daffy taking a weed whacker to the saucer’s decorative foliage—and asked him, “So, we’re in the library. What would you like to read?”
“Actually, I hadn’t given it much thought.” He grinned at her. “I was enjoying the conversation.”
“Awww,” she awwwed. “You’re sweet—big, furry, and goofy—but sweet. I have some other chores I need to take care of, though. So, I’m gonna get you a book and let you read while I go do them. Waddaya wanna read, dude?”
He looked at the vast expanse of book-filled shelves before him. There seemed to be quite the selection. “Uh, poetry? Does she have any Wordsworth?”
“Does she have any Wordsworth? I’m pretty sure she has all the words worth anything in a library this size.”
“So, she does?”
“I have no idea, let’s find out. Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
Exasperation crept into her tone. “I just explained it to you.”
“No, you said that being witnessed by people who haven’t had their ‘cherry popped’ made it harder, made it take ‘more power and skill'. You’ve already admitted that I’ve definitely had my cherry popped in this regard.”
“Yeah, but you’re still a noob to all of this. You don’t really believe—”
“I don’t believe? What the hell choice do I have? This hand of mine means that I have no fucking choice.” He had not meant to sound as upset as he did. “If I close my eyes and try to remember that wolf-thing’s growl, I can hear it so clearly that I nearly piss myself in terror. I don’t think it was a weather balloon. Oh, I fucking believe alright. I might wish I didn’t have to believe, but I fucking do.”
“Yeah. Fine. Whatever. I’m self-conscious about trying to do this in front of you. You’re gonna think this looks weird.”
“Yeah. Fine. Whatever,” he repeated in a tone that was only slightly mocking. “I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable, but I’d really like to see some of this sorcery I’ve been hearing about. Apparently, all the cool kids are doing it.”
“Wordsworth, right?”
“Yep. William Wordsworth.”
She closed her eyes and held up a finger to silence him. She muttered something under her breath and began to move her hands. Compared to the usual gestures she made while talking, these were surprisingly subtle. Her eyes popped open. “Holy shit, dude. It’s like you’re not even here.”
“Huh?”
“I mean you were right. Even with you watching, I can’t feel any difference. This is going to be waaaaay easier than I thought.” She closed her eyes and began to mutter again, making those subtle hand movements.
She did not, exactly, start to glow, but to Kirby’s eyes there seemed to be an aura of...something...around her. He did not have the words for it. Perhaps, if pressed, he might have described it as a blur or a distortion. Whatever it was, it started to build. Her chanting remained almost a whisper, but it seemed like there was an increase in what he could only describe as the frequency. Suddenly, her chanting and gesturing stopped.
Kirby could not actually see the rapidly appearing and disappearing arcs of light that curved between her seated form and what may have been every book on the library’s immense shelves, but it felt like he saw it. The impression of having seen it remained with him.
A book leapt from the shelves on the wall to their right, near the bottom. It flew across room and into Amy’s outstretched hand, which closed around the slim, green volume. She tossed it into his lap, then sprang to her feet.
“There,” she said. “That should do you. Get up and pull the bell cord if you need anything. And if you can’t, just give a shout and somebody will come.”
“Thanks.” As she walked towards the door, he added, “That was impressive, by the way, the sorcery stuff.”
“Thanks, dude.” She acknowledged the compliment without looking back.
He watched her go, then picked up the book from his lap and examined it. It was slender and bound in green cloth. Embossed in gold on the cover were the words “Leaves of Grass.” He smiled. Sorcery, it seemed, was not a perfect tool, or Amy had not yet perfected its use. He would give her points, though. Walt Whitman was not William Wordsworth, but they were poets with the same initials. The book was old but in quite good shape. He opened it. The date on the frontispiece was 1855. On the preceding page, beneath what was presumably an illustration of the author, he found an inscription that read, “Dearest Adelaide, our disagreement regarding William Wordsworth notwithstanding, I number you among my truest friends. Walt Whitman.”
"Well, ain’t that a kick in the head?" he said aloud to the empty library.