A bad painter only worries about how his barn looks. He doesn’t work his brush into the nooks and shadows. His barn is handsome enough from the road. But when a wet spring comes, the eaves fall off. Do not neglect inconvenient corners.
—The Art of Painting a Barn by Mr. B. Ritter
Day 4
I have eaten the chocolate. To the future me that reads this: I am sorry. It was delicious.
And entirely deserved.
When Byron said there were traps, I didn’t believe him. This place is so attractive and congenial. I thought the stag was trying to provoke me the way he does Edith. Unfortunately for me, he was in earnest. The Sphinx is a trapper of men.
The absurdity of this is not lost on me. Snares in a library? What next? Bears in the schools? Vipers in the hospitals?
The librarian knows where the traps are, I am convinced, and so the going is absolutely safe so long as I never stray from his shadow.
Again. So long as I never do it again.
We’d had such an agreeable walk, and though I felt a little achy and ill, I was in good spirits. How could I not be? My hallucinations had ceased. For the first time in months, I was free of ghosts, and my head was beginning to clear.
The librarian was just tucking into his dinner, and I was sitting upwind at the opposite end of an atrium that seemed a sort of crossroads. Aisle after aisle broke off from the central courtyard. Some aisles sloped downward into shadow; others canted up toward light. Some turned sharply in a new direction and so seemed to dead-end. One aisle ran straight toward a point that was so distant all the shelves appeared to merge into one.
What an architectural onion this library is! I cannot imagine how it was built or filled.
I had just cleared a stack of brittle newspapers from a warm leather chair and was preparing to dive into a particularly interesting book I’d found about a Pelphian pastime called the Game of Oops, when my ears pricked to the distant sound of someone crying.
No, not crying: It was a low, consternated weeping.
I had heard this sort of sob before. In that old life of mine, a student would occasionally wander from the schoolyard during recess. I’d chase after them to turn them around and lecture them of the dangers of truancy. Unless I found them crying. Then I would walk with them in a wide circuit around the yard, careful to keep the school and the other children at a comfortable distance. I’d wait until their frustration began to wane, and then I would undertake the most egregious small talk. I’d say things like, “Oh, aren’t the roses pretty this year!” Or, “Did you hear that Mr. Hardy caught a four-foot flounder?” Or that most miserable saw of polite conversation: “Do you think it will rain?” And so on, until the student, now dry-eyed and desperate to get away, would ask to be excused.
Oh, those were the little rescues of which I was so proud!
I followed the voice into a dim, narrow aisle. The space was so tight I had to turn to the side to enter it. More than once, I was forced to duck under or step over a volume that protruded into the lane. I felt like a leaf pressed in a book. I wanted to reverse course, to escape that strangled feeling, but the sobbing grew more distinct. I was sure it was a child.
The alley came to a corner, which I barely wedged around, and then opened upon a high, wide rotunda.
There were no furnishings there, and for the first time in days, I saw not a single book. Fat pillars of greenstone stood in a circle under a flawless, egg-white dome. It seemed the perfect place for giving speeches. The open floor before me was inset with a round, copper plate some thirty feet across. It resembled the Brick Layer’s front door, right down to the embossed figures walking in a circle, though they were subtly changed. Rather than passing their bricks and sharing the load with smiles stamped upon their faces, these miserable figures struck at one another’s backs with daggers and with spears.
A man lay on the floor at the precise center of the big coin. He—I presumed it was a he—was dressed in heavy leathers and curled nearly into a ball. His helmet, an old-fashioned iron morion, obscured his face.
The sobbing seemed to be coming from him.
From the brink of the medallion, I called, “Sir, madam, are you all right?”
There was no reply.
Without further deliberation, I rushed to the man’s side. He lay curled, a little protectively it seemed, around a drain in the floor. A child’s pale hand reached up through the iron grating, like a prisoner in a foul oubliette. The sobbing emerged from that bleak recess.
“I’m here,” I said, leaning over the curled man. I grasped the child’s hand.
Then everything went very oddly.
I realized the child’s hand was made of wood an instant before I felt the click of a switch travel up through it. A heavy clang shuddered the floor.
I stepped away from the grate, and the room tilted. The ground ahead of me began to descend. Teetering onto my toes, I glimpsed the darkness hiding under the floor.
I fell backward over the leathered body, and the great medallion leveled again.
My fall jogged the helmet from the man’s head. The skull behind it was as brown as a raisin. I scooted away in revulsion, and the floor sank under me. I threw myself upon the skeleton again, and the ground righted. I tried another direction and was thwarted by the same result. Whichever way I stepped, the whole, heavy plate of the medallion tilted and chased me back into the arms of the corpse.
I was sitting on a plate balanced upon a point, and beneath me was a yawning gulf, a nothing, a bottomless pit.
I was trapped.
(The librarian is asleep, and I am exhausted. I’ll finish this account in the morning, unless some horror befalls me in my sleep. In which case, there will be no point to bragging about the time I cheated death.)
Day 5
(I survived the night! Books make terrible bedding. The librarian is eating breakfast. I think I will endure the stink of it this morning. Somehow, the thought of sitting off on my own has lost its appeal.)
It was quite something to realize I’d been caught in another man’s trap. I had laid so many of my own, I suppose I thought myself immune. Worse, it was an obvious trap: an empty room, a funny floor, an unresponsive body, and the sound of a bawling child. Really, what else could it have been?
But what sort of paranoid and conscienceless person puts a trap in a library? The Sphinx wishes to distinguish himself from Marat, who seems bent on destroying the records of our race for reasons I cannot fathom but which I presume are ignoble and shortsighted. Yet is it any better to preserve the canon of human thought by making it inaccessible and unfriendly to all? One man destroys; the other man hides. The difference seems academic.
I do wonder how the Sphinx managed to capture and replay a human voice. His technology is so advanced it hardly makes sense; it just seems a sort of casual magic. It’s bizarre to think that right now Madame Bhata is likely sitting in her web of yarn, sewing a crude record of the day’s events in hieroglyphs and hatch marks. Meanwhile, the Sphinx has divined a method for bottling voices!
How different would the world be if such wonders were to get out?
But, back to the trap.
The grate with the protruding lever of a hand wouldn’t come off, no matter how I pried. The sobbing stopped once the trap was sprung, which was a small mercy. It was one thing to rot in stoic silence; it was quite another to be serenaded to death by a bawling child.
Since I had no choice but to sit so close, I could not help but scrutinize my companion. I came to the conclusion that he had been some sort of errant knight. The antiquated helmet, the leather armor, and the brocaded tabard, balled like a pillow under his head—it all suggested nobility. He had perished coming to the aid of what he thought was a child in distress. Whoever he was, we were kindred at least in this.
I wondered how long he lasted before succumbing to dehydration. On closer inspection, I made the grim discovery that much of his leather jerkin had been systematically chewed.
The thought crossed my mind that the librarian might come to my rescue, and I spent perhaps a quarter of an hour shouting for him. But the more I cried for the cat to come (a bankrupt prospect from the start), the more I wondered what exactly I expected him to do. Fetch a rescue party? It hardly seemed likely. And what had Byron said: Once the librarian went looking for a book, nothing turned his head?
I wish to spare myself the embarrassment of recording all the troubled thoughts that spooled through my head while I sat in the lap of the dead knight. But who would I be hiding the truth from? The oblivion of a shelf? The possibility of another trap, another pit I shan’t escape? Or perhaps I wish to hide the truth from myself?
The trouble is, I did not dwell upon the subjects I should have. Faced with a slow death, I should have reflected upon my life with Marya, both the one that we shared and the one we anticipated, a life cut short by my arrogance and prudishness.
But I did not meditate on such regrets.
Instead, I thought of how diligently I had deceived myself in the months since our separation. First, I hid my doubt, then my despair, and then my fear. It seems a conspicuous litany of flaws to blame upon the Crumb. I can’t in good conscience do it.
I recalled my impression of the old woman I saw long ago at the foot of the Tower, scouring the Lost and Found with a determination, which, at the start of my own ordeal, seemed far from noble. I thought her weak and neurotic. And I believed I was superior to such a trap. Hope. What is its dimension? How long is it? Where does it lead? When does it become habitual, automatic, the answer not only to doubt, but also to action, and redemption, and living?
Again and again, I thought not of Marya, but of Edith: her patience, her resilience, her poise, and her sound advice amid all of my bad. I thought of the coincidental embraces we shared, all the occasions when fate put us in each other’s arms, an innocent thing, but not unaware. Not without feeling. And I wanted to survive, because if I did, I knew I would see her again.
Is that wrong? Is it wrong to miss what is attainable?
I spent perhaps an hour in a state of absolute turmoil before concluding that I would rather die trying to escape than die chewing up my clothes.
The proud headmaster in me resurged, and I thought, This is the sort of thing I can puzzle my way out of. Which may seem a completely asinine thing to think. But I have learned a little arrogance in the face of death is not the worst approach.
I studied the copper floor, the green pillars, which marked the shoreline I would eventually have to leap for, and the unblemished dome above. While craning about, I stumbled again and again over my companion. It began to seem a sort of clowning routine. I tried not to think about him because I knew he had stared at this room for hours, days, until he withered away. He had pondered himself to death. Which didn’t bode well for me.
What did I have that he didn’t?
I began to wonder how well the trap would work if a dozen men were standing on the plate when it was sprung. The more men, the more likely it seemed that the unbalance would be sudden and fatal. Even if by some miracle the men were evenly distributed, they would all have to leap clear at once, or most of them would end up in the hole.
Probably, the only hopeful scenario was one in which two levelheaded and similarly weighted individuals were standing together on the fulcrum at the moment when the trap was activated. If they had any presence of mind, it would not be too difficult for them to pace in exactly opposing directions, using each other’s weight as a counterbalance, until they both had traversed safely back to solid ground.
And in this lay the revelation: What did I have that my poor stranded companion did not? I had a counterbalance. I had him.
The trouble, of course, was getting a dead man to walk.
But he didn’t have to walk. He could slide.
I spread out his tabard and rolled him upon it, hoping that the length of felt would be as good as a sled. I did not allow myself to dwell on what I planned to do; I suspected on this occasion consideration was the enemy of courage.
I set my heel on the corpse’s side and pushed him away.
I won’t pretend the production went smoothly. I overestimated the skeleton’s weight and almost slid off at once. The slope brought him coasting after me, and I had to leap over him as he flew past. One of us got off center, and the plate tilted in a new direction. I tried to correct it, but sent the gallant knight sliding back to center instead.
After all that hopping and sliding, we were back where we began.
My second attempt was more considered. By degrees, I managed to shift the knight toward the opposite shore of the plate. I shuffled forward, and he retreated; I shuffled backward, and he stopped. Our telescopic dance went on for what seemed hours, but which could scarcely have been more than a few minutes.
When at last I had backed my way to the edge of the trap, it occurred to me that the moment I stepped off the plate, the knight would be unceremoniously dumped into the void. It seemed an unkind way to handle the man who had saved my life, but there was no helping it.
Stepping from the coin, I glimpsed the abyss beneath and the spire upon which the plate balanced. Then the floor fell again, and the knight was gone.
I returned to the crossroads where I had left the librarian and found him curled upon my backpack, sleeping on his tins of food like a dragon on its hoard.