30

Lexie was learning to hate the library. The smell of the place drove her insane. Each step through the stacks was like trying to dig nose-first through layers of oily fingertips and mold. She learned to carry tissues or else risk sneezing a trail from the bound periodicals on the ground floor all the way up to the first editions on the top story.

She gave up searching the computers for language dictionaries and eventually took her query to the circulation desk. After fifteen minutes of awkward, half-formed questions, the librarian finally sent her to the fifth floor to browse the local texts. He had scribbled some call numbers, although he warned her that most of the books up there didn’t fit into the standard organizing system and that Lexie would have to “follow her instincts.” Lexie groaned on the inside, tired of having to rely on her instincts for every damn decision she was making these days. Just once, she wanted to be able to rely on cool logic and deductive reasoning to get her out of a situation. But no. She was part animal now, which meant all her earned human faculties were relegated to the background as she learned to listen to an entirely bizarre part of her brain that told her when to flee, fight, feed, and fuck, with no room for negotiation.

She took the stairs three at a time, tiny leaps, over and over, carrying her to answers, or at least a passing grade.

Deep within the recesses of the fifth floor she smelled more mold and some sex. Clearly this part of the library was used for only storage and midterm quickies.

She wove her way through the stacks to books with no spine titles—just quiet rows of simple burgundy leather bindings shelved tightly together. She pulled a thin one out and flipped through it. The pages rustled like dry November leaves, more at risk of cracking than tearing. She landed on a page that delineated varieties of meat and matched them to words with some recognizable characters and other foreign ones. Lexie tenderly turned to the first page which read “Icelandic Language Guide, United States War Department, 1944.” She replaced the book and pulled out another, this one in Russian. Each book she pulled down was a different language guide, seemingly written entirely to teach soldiers how to communicate with native speakers before they killed them.

She laughed bitterly, realizing this was exactly why she needed her own language guide.

Knowing no one would care much, Lexie pulled out every text that had sigils of any kind, whether true sigils or merely characters foreign to Lexie: Norse, Voodoo, Kabbalah, and Santeria piled among Russian, Old English, Dutch, Farsi, Arabic, and innumerable indigenous language guides.

The light through the sliver windows waned and her stuffed nose became too much. With the same frustration as when she tried on ill-fitting clothes for hours, Lexie quit her meandering search. She stood at once and walked, nearly ran, away from the pointless stacks of dead words.

She grabbed three of the texts at random and took them to the front desk for checkout.

When the librarian scanned her ID card, he said, “Clarion. We’ve got another book on hold for you. One sec.”

He wheeled his chair to the shelves behind him, pulling down a tiny black leather-bound book and adding it to her stack.

“I didn’t order that,” she said.

He shrugged and handed it to her.

Lexie packed the rest of the books away in her bag and walked to the student union, the mystery book in her hand. She flipped through its pages while waiting in line for the cashier to ring up her coffee.

It was a smallish book bound in plain black library binding. The pages were thin, almost like parchment, and the text was clearly from a typewriter, one of the old ones before they became electric.

She thumbed back to the first page. In faded patchy script, Lexie read Miss Lucille Shoal. Anthropology, Milton College, Milton, Oregon, 1888. She flipped past an etching of a sunset over a forest scene and let her fingers glide along the smooth pages, finding the tiny indentations beneath each letter strike. Words she’d never seen before, and hand-drawn sigils and symbols that seemed so odd as to be alien, covered the pages. Every so often was a plate of weaponry, home life, or portraits. On page 74 she found a woodcut of a wolf. A large, fierce wolf. A Rare.

Her fingers grazed the image. The creature’s fur was detailed to the point of obsession. The animal’s face was crude, though, resembling more a Chinese dragon than any wolf she’d known. Its tongue slavered out of its mouth, a serpentine creature in its own right. Lexie tried not to laugh at this caricature.

Two pages later she found another etching, this of a person, some sort of shaman, their hands palm-down above a table covered with bowls and pottery. The shaman’s head was tilted back, looking at the sky. The inscription below read: Berdache shaman conducting rite.

Flipping further, Lexie found a slip of yellow paper wedged between two pages. On it was fresh, new print: a series of sigils perfectly drawn. She removed it, flipping it over, searching for meaning.

A few pages later, she found its mate: a codex. The sigils were paired with sounds written in the standard alphabet.

“Next,” the checkout lady called, giving Lexie an impatient look. Lexie slipped the paper back into the book at the codex page and rushed forward to buy her coffee.