The Library of the Dead Read online

  One night I even heard drawers sliding open and slamming closed in some old microfilm cabinets stored on one of the third floor breezeways. When I went upstairs to check things out, I found a spool loaded on the oldest microfilm reader and the machine humming away. I knew that no one had been using that equipment before closing … but there it was. Of course, I looked at the screen. Someone had been reading an old Life magazine article about Jack the Ripper. That was a little too creepy for me. I put away the microfilm and turned off the equipment, then set the building alarm and called it a night.

  When I came to work the next afternoon, I ran into one of my closers in the quad. Stephen worked a lot of late-night shifts, and he’d go for a run around the campus after we closed the library at midnight.

  “Hey,” he said, “were you in the building last night around one a.m.?”

  “No. I cut out about ten minutes after you did. I was already home by then.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  Stephen paused, as if he was hesitant to say more. “That’s weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Well, I was running past the library around one o’clock. You know. Along the access road. And I had this weird feeling someone was watching me. I glanced up at those big windows overlooking the parking lot, and I could see that breezeway on the third floor where the old microfilm readers are. The lights were off, but someone was up there. I only saw his silhouette, but I got the feeling he was staring right at me.”

  “Spooky,” I said. “Unless you’re just yanking my chain to get out of working more night shifts.”

  “Not at all. You know I like nights the best. I just thought I should tell you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Stephen hesitated.

  “Something else?” I asked.

  “Yeah … but you’ll think I’m crazy.”

  I laughed. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Well … don’t judge, but the guy I saw up there on the third floor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was wearing a top hat.”

  Ghost or man, I kind of forgot about the wearer of the top hat … at least for a while. There was a lot going on in my head, and some of it wouldn’t shake loose no matter how hard I tried. Mostly I was hung up on Rebecca, the puzzle box, and the hidden key to that storage unit. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. And the worst thing was that no matter how much I thought, I couldn’t decide what I should do about the whole mess … so I didn’t do anything.

  I hate inertia. Don’t you?

  Anyway, I knew I’d go crazy if I kept spinning on a (metaphorical) hamster wheel, so I went looking for distraction. The college Archivist suggested that I ought to move up the food chain and get a Masters in Library Science. It sounded like a good idea, and maybe an answer to the Rebecca problem, too—school would keep my mind occupied during the day, and work would keep me busy at night. At the time I figured it was best to think less and do more.

  So that was the way I played it. I was accepted to a program at a state college just before the semester started. Remember, this was the nineties. There weren’t a lot of online classes yet. So I spent a good chunk of time driving to the campus, which was about sixty miles south of my apartment. Three hours of class, and then I’d make the drive back to work and put in my eight hours. For the first semester, I barely spent any time in my apartment at all … and when I was there I was (almost invariably) sleeping.

  Some classes were dull, some interesting. It was the same with the people in them. There was one girl in a couple of my classes. Her name was Daphne, which is one of those names that conjures two very disparate sources—either the seductive niad from Greek mythology, or the hot chick from Scooby-Doo.

  And maybe in the end Daphne was a little bit of both. In those days most people would have (mistakenly) called her a Goth, but she was really more of a fifties throwback with a rockabilly twist. She wore a lot of black, and had these tortoise-shell glasses and a Betty Page hairstyle. Residing on her left arm was a tattoo of Elvis with a raven perched on his shoulder. Just those three sentences were enough to tell me that she really didn’t see life the way I did at all. Meaning: Forget secreting things away in compartmentalized boxes; Daphne seemed to wear her boxes on the outside.

  That was a strange enough concept for a fellow like me, but it wasn’t what—dare I say it?—sparked my attraction. Not really. What I liked most about Daphne was that she’d say whatever she felt like saying without worrying about stepping on someone else’s blue suede shoes.

  Ha ha. Just a little Elvis humor there.

  What I mean to say is that Daphne didn’t care what other people thought of her. Plus, she was really funny … if you got her jokes and references, anyway. Most people in the class didn’t have a clue, but I did. Sometimes I’d laugh out loud at something she said. More often I’d just arch an eyebrow, or grin. Daphne didn’t let on that she noticed, but she did … and pretty soon I’d catch her checking me out after she said something just to gauge my reaction.

  Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I knew it I was thinking about Daphne a lot, especially during those drives between school and work. I even bought some CDs with artists I knew she liked—Elvis (of course), but also Wanda Jackson, Robert Gordon, and The Collins Kids. Sometimes I’d get lost in those songs while driving, just thinking of Daphne. I even ran over a dog on the way home one Friday night, so wrapped up in Gordon’s version of “Only Make Believe” that I barely even noticed.

  Bow-wow.

  Clunk clunk.

  Daphne Daphne Daphne.

  Pathetic, right? I know. But that’s the way my world turned… for a while, anyway. Of course, I still thought about Rebecca, too. It wasn’t the same. Not at all. And then one night while driving home from work, I realized that I’d finally decided what to do about the oh-so-troubling Dr. Nakamura, and the puzzle box, and the whole horrible mess.

  The solution was simple, once I realized what had changed between me and Rebecca. My brain had already moved on, along with the small little knot of muscle that passed for my heart. It was time for the rest of me to follow, and (metaphorically speaking, anyway) put Dr. Nakamura in the rearview mirror.

  There was only one way to do that.

  I’d have to kill Rebecca.

  And close her box for good.

  I’m like most people. There are some things I’m proud of, and (if I’m honest with myself) more than a few that I’m not. Take my criminal record, for instance. It’s embarrassing. I can’t even bring myself to tell you some of the things I’ve been convicted for. Stupid stuff, and more than a little compulsive … which is even more embarrassing, because it’s hard to admit that a compulsion can overcome your natural intelligence.

  But that’s the way it was with me. The only good thing about my rap sheet was that it didn’t match the profile for the type of perp who committed the crimes that were actually my forte. In other words, I was very successful at not getting caught for anything that mattered. In a way, I imagine that was why things went as smoothly as they did for such a long time. My record created a kind of blind alley sure to send inquisitive cops on equally blind detours … until that last thing with Daphne, anyway.

  But there I go again, getting ahead of myself. I warned you I’d do that occasionally. Back to the upside—the things I’m proud of. One of them is my woodworking, and the true shame of that is that very few people ever saw the things I made. Like the boxes I built for Rebecca. Not the Japanese puzzle box. The other ones—the custom-made caskets I built to put her in after she was dead. They were beautiful, especially the box I made for her head. It was made of Zelkova wood seasoned for twenty years, and it was as lustrously blonde as the highlights in Rebecca’s hair. I worked with the Zelkova to bring out its glow and inlaid a dark forest of stained hemlock fir against it—the latter wood harvested from Aokiaghara, the Japanese forest at the base of Mt. Fuji which was infamous for its suicides.
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  Of course, Aokiaghara was famous for its ghosts, too, but I didn’t think about that then.

  I think about it now, though … and often.

  To this day I wish I’d never touched that wood.

  It was a night in May, just before the Memorial Day Weekend. I’d closed the library, and (now that Rebecca’s boxes were finished) I’d been sitting in my office for hours planning her murder. From out of nowhere, a door slammed upstairs. A moment later, that sound was followed by a short burst of down in the bottom of a cave laughter.

  That laughter didn’t scare me. It made me mad. After all, I already had more than enough on my plate to keep me busy. The last thing I needed was a supernatural side-order of ghostly laughter crowding out the main entree. I was just about to grab a mallet from my woodworking tools and head upstairs to see if I could pound ectoplasm into cobwebs when the office phone rang. I grabbed the handset, said my name and the name of the library, so off my game that I didn’t even bother with “How can I help you?”

  “Riddle me this, Batman.”

  “Huh?”

  “Where do you find narrow houses that last until doomsday?”

  “The graveyard, of course. Now who is this, and—”

  “Well, my name isn’t Ophelia.”

  “What?”

  “C’mon, slowpoke. You must’ve guessed by now. It’s Daphne, from cataloging class.”

  “How’d you figure out where I work? I never mentioned the name of the library in class.”

  Daphne only laughed. “I’m a librarian, Sherlock … or I’m going to be, anyway. Have you tried this new search engine called Google? It’s pretty amazing what you can find.”

  “I’m more of an AlltheWeb guy,” I said.

  “That’s a good one, too. I like the way you can search by specific dates.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Well, you answered my riddle, so you’re still in the game. And Memorial Day Weekend is just around the corner, which means a certain destination is de rigueur.”

  “So we’re back to graveyards?”

  “Dig it. We should excavate and investigate. You can be Mr. Burke, and I’ll be Ms. Hare.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Certainly, silly. After all, we’re a couple of purely straight-up individuals, embarking on careers as library professionals. So no shovels, no holes in the ground … just a nice little picnic lunch among the tombstones.”

  “That sounds kind of morbid.”

  “Indeed it does, but I’m kind of a morbid girl. And you’re not too far off the mark … if I read you right, anyway. Besides, the cemetery I’m thinking of has something special.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A library. You need to see it.”

  A library in a cemetery—now I was curious. Really curious. We exchanged a few more words, and somehow they seemed heavier now, as if everything we said had some kind of double meaning. I couldn’t even tell you what it was, only that it carried a particular edge … and a certain weight not unlike secrets or truth.

  Whatever it was, it was unsettling. I was relieved to hang up the phone. But I’ll be honest—any trepidation I’d had turned to (more than rabid) curiosity … and something much stronger. Something I’ll have to let you name. I’ll simply say that I didn’t have to be in Daphne’s presence to realize the power she had over me. It was there, even over the phone. Those lips of hers, painted black, smiling just a little bit. A simple arch of an eyebrow, and a gleaming pupil (nearly) dilated past the color of its iris. All of that a vision in my head, so strong that I had to close my eyes and hold my breath.

  “Daphne Daphne Daphne,” I whispered.

  Speaking her name to myself.

  And no one else at all.

  I don’t like dreams. I’ve never trusted them. They don’t fit well into compartments, and you can’t control them. That means they’re dangerous … and the one I had that night after talking to Daphne was the most dangerous dream I ever had in my life.

  It began in the library, and things were just the way they had been a few hours before. Only Daphne didn’t call me, and I wasn’t sitting in my office. No. I was sitting at the Circulation Desk. The library was closed and the building was dark except for that particular square of workplace illumination, which was surrounded by three counters and several metal shelves.

  A door slammed somewhere upstairs, and that sound was followed by a short chorus of (by now familiar) bottom of a cave laughter. The dual sounds spurred my anger, just as they had in real life. And just the same way, I was ready to grab one of my hammers and make a trip upstairs to see if it was possible to pound a hole in a ghost.

  So I stood up, and quickly. The rolling chair shot out behind me as if launched from a cannon, banging into the Reserves shelves. But that didn’t matter, because I didn’t move an inch. Instead, I just stood there, my feet suddenly buried in cement, frozen in place by a man standing on the staircase landing on the other side of the lobby. He wore a top hat, and (from a distance) his face seemed as narrow as it was pale. The rest of him was black—frock coat with a strange twice-buckled collar, riding boots, trousers, leather gloves.

  That the man had not been there on the landing a moment before was a certainty … I was sure of that. But he was here now, and that was just as certain. Only five stairs separated the landing from the main floor. The man glided down them the way a marionette does, as if he were an apparition pretending to descend a staircase to create an expected impression.

  Soon he was halfway across the lobby. As he came closer to the desk, into the light, the pale face beneath his black top hat came clearly into view. Only it wasn’t a face. It was a translucent mask, imprinted with a slight smile that didn’t seem like a smile at all. And the voice that came from behind it betrayed nothing more than did the expression—it was neutral, and little more than a whisper, with just the slightest hint of a British accent.

  The man said, “I’d like to place an item on Reserve.”

  “You’re a faculty member?”

  “No, but I am a teacher, and I do have pupils. And I would like to—”

  “If you’re not a faculty member at this institution, I can’t help you.”

  “Oh, but I’m certain that you can. You might say I have specific knowledge of an item housed in Special Collections here, and that knowledge is accompanied by certain privileges. I wish to share those privileges … with you, to begin.”

  “Well, I’m not a student, so I don’t quite understand your request. What’s the item, anyway?”

  “As I said, it’s housed in Special Collections. It’s an autopsy kit from the Victorian era, an item of some particular import. I’d like to make it available for your inspection … and use.”

  Now I laughed. The idea of an autopsy kit in the library was completely ridiculous. “We don’t have anything like that here.”

  “You most certainly do have. If you doubt me, look on the prep shelf behind you.”

  I did, and there it was, on the shelf with the other items waiting to be added to the Reserves Collection—a long case with leather straps, similar to ones I’d seen in medical histories of the Victorian era.

  “Who are you?” It was the only question I could ask, but the man in the top hat didn’t reply. He simply stood there, not moving at all … as if waiting. And then, he did move. Or at least his lips did. Not the pair on that mask, but the lips barely visible beneath that translucent plastic seemed to writhe, and curve, and—

  Quite suddenly, the man reached up with one black-gloved hand and removed the mask from his face. Beneath, there wasn’t a face at all. Just a mass of wriggling grave worms—pink, and gray, and blood red—balanced in a large horrible knot atop the twice-buckled collar of his heavy coat. The mass bulged and wobbled, and for a moment I was afraid it would topple and spill those horrid creatures across the desk. But it didn’t topple at all. Instead it seemed to grow tighter, like a clenched fist. And then several bloated speci
mens twisted across the space where a mouth should have been, approximating lips … approximating a smile.

  “You really want to know who I am?” the thing asked, its voice holding a horrible tenor of amusement.

  I managed a nod.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes … I am.”

  My words seemed to hang in the air. Those worms writhed and twisted, as if trying to snare them. The thing’s smile became larger, the lips becoming a thick woven hole that widened over a patch of blackness. Soon enough, other words came from within that hole.

  “Then you must do as I say—slip your fingers into my mouth like a good lad, and I’ll tell you my name.”

  If I’d had any control, it was gone now. I closed my eyes and reached out as if hypnotized. My fingers slid inside that hole rimmed with worms, and the thing’s mouth closed around them. Suddenly everything around me, and everything I heard, was a whisper. I was inside it, in a very small space no larger than the himtsu-bako box I’d built for Dr. Nakamura.

  And, then, for a moment, I was nowhere at all.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up in my apartment.

  Screaming.

  For a smart lady, Rebecca did some really stupid things. Like most people, she was a creature of habit. That was lucky for me. It was also lucky that the conference where she was presenting her paper took place on Memorial Day Weekend, just far enough north so it’d be a tough drive to make in a single day. Which (of course) meant I’d have to do just that, kill Dr. Nakamura, then make it back home in time to set up a solid alibi.

  So pedal to the metal all the way up Highway 5 and across the Oregon border, cutting over to the coast and hitting the little resort town just as twilight fell. A long spike of beach jutted into the Pacific just south of the place, and I didn’t park anywhere near it. No. I parked a mile away at a rocky beach unpopular with tourists, and I grabbed the backpack that contained my murder kit and humped it double-time down a state park trail that connected the two.