Dean Koontz: Innocence

I liked that immense space, the colonnades and the curved vaults overhead, which reminded me of photos of the extensive reservoirs constructed by Francois d’Orbay beneath the Water Terrace and gardens of the palace at Versailles. In the moving beam of my flashlight, the shadows of the columns swung aside like great black doors.

A regular elevator and one for freight served the basement, but I never used them. Stairs were silent, safer. Having a choice of enclosed stairwells, I took the one in the southeast corner.

Books, of course, were what drew me to this library. Although Father and his father before him had collected volumes that had been thrown away by those who lived in the open, although I could borrow reading material from thrift stores in which I shopped after hours, many books were not easily found other than in the central library.

The stairs brought me to the walnut-paneled periodical room, where newspapers and magazines could be enjoyed. A short hallway led to the main reading room, a sixteen-thousand-square-foot architectural masterpiece rising from a sea of dark-caramel marble flooring. This immense chamber housed part of the book collection and, beyond that maze of shelves, provided seating for at least five hundred readers at wooden refectory-style tables.

Always before, at this late hour, the reading room had been brightened only by the eerie, ambient light of the city seeping through its high, arched windows. This time, numerous lamps glowed.

I almost retreated, but intuition counseled me to wait, to see, to know.

Decades earlier, night watchmen patrolled the many rooms and corridors of the central library. But in a nation that had nearly spent its way into bankruptcy, sturdy locks and a perimeter alarm were the preferred form of security, because they didn’t require salaries, health care, and pensions.

Through the eight-foot-high rows of shelves, which librarians called stacks, aisles led east-west and north-south. As I approached an entrance to the labyrinth, I heard footsteps that were almost inaudible even in this quietude, footsteps so light and quick that they might have been those of a child ghost desperately fleeing from the recognition of his early death.

In the opening before me, crossing an intersection of aisles, a slender teenage girl appeared from the left, which was the north, gazelle-fast, running with balletic grace and landing on her toes. Her shoes were silver, like the winged feet of Mercury, and otherwise she wore black. Her long hair appeared black, too, lustrous in the lamplight, as a pool of moonlit water lies glossy in the night. One moment there, the next moment gone, she seemed to be running for her life.

I heard no pursuer, though her evident alarm suggested that one must be close on her trail. If she was the prey, I didn’t know—and couldn’t imagine—any predator stealthier than she.

Warily, I entered the stacks. The big chandeliers, hung from the fifty-foot-high ceiling, were not alight. The aisle that the girl had run through lay deserted for its considerable length, illuminated by brushed-steel sconces trimmed with polished brass, like small lamps, fixed high on the six-inch-wide stiles that separated sections of shelving.

These shelves had backs, so that I couldn’t look over the tops of the books into the next aisle. Stepping softly, I continued east, into the next north-south passage that paralleled the first, but the girl wasn’t there.

The stacks were arranged in a large grid, not as mazelike as the board for that old video game Ms. Pac-Man. Yet it seemed far more baffling than a grid as I cautiously made my way through it, spying around corners, turning this way and that as intuition guided me.

I was heading south, approaching a corner, intending to turn left, when I must have heard something, perhaps the faintest squeak of a rubber-soled shoe. I froze between the last two sconces, not in shadow but not brightly lighted.

A tall, sinewy man hurried through the intersection in front of me, from right to left, apparently so sure of his quarry’s location that he didn’t glance in either direction as he crossed my aisle and disappeared. I thought that he must have registered my presence peripherally and that he would startle back for a more direct look, but he kept moving.

He’d been dressed in a suit and tie, minus the coat, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, which suggested that he belonged here, worked here in a position of authority. But something about him—perhaps his intensity, his grimly set mouth, his hands clenched in big bony fists—convinced me that his intentions were suspect if not even dishonorable.

I dared to follow him, but by the time I turned the corner, he had vanished. Even as familiar as I had become with the library, this might be his labyrinth more than mine. If his role was the Minotaur of legend and if my role was Theseus, who destroyed such beasts, this might end badly for the good guys, considering that I’d never killed anything, monsters or otherwise.

The girl cried out and the man shouted, “Bitch, you little bitch, I’ll kill you,” and the girl cried out again. The clump-and-thud of avalanching books suggested that someone must be using the weapon of knowledge in an unconventional fashion.

The acoustics of the enormous room were deceiving. The ornate and gilded ceiling coffers, the limestone walls, the marble floor, the endless partitions of muffling books alternately absorbed and ricocheted sounds until it seemed that the brief battle was being waged in every aisle of the stacks, to all sides of me. Then sudden silence.

I stood in an intersection, head cocked, turning in a circle, my heart racing, fearful that something had happened to her. I recalled that the Minotaur, in the caverns under Crete, ate human flesh.

HOOD UP, HEAD DOWN AS BEST I COULD KEEP IT AND still find my way, I turned left, right, left, this way, that way, around and back again, through History with all its wars, through Natural Sciences with all its discoveries and mysteries. Several times I heard sly movement, the light quick breathing of the girl, a muttered curse in a low male voice. I glimpsed him ahead of me twice, turning a corner. I didn’t see her, but that was good, excellent, better than finding her corpse.

I discovered the aisle where books were scattered on the floor, perhaps thrown by the girl or pulled off the shelves to foil her pursuer. It pained me to see books treated that way. But she was maybe sixteen, all of a hundred pounds, if that. The man with his sleeves rolled up stood about six two, weighed nearly twice what she did, clearly couldn’t control his anger, and threatened to kill her. If she had to destroy the entire library to save herself, she would be in the right. Each book is a mind alive, a life revealed, a world awaiting exploration, but living people are all those things, as well—and more, because their stories haven’t yet been completely told.

Then something changed, and for a moment I thought it was just that the small sounds of search and evasion had given way again to utter silence. But the faintest susurration rose, vaguely liquid in character, as though a thousand thin threads of water were gently spilling from bowl to bowl of a tiered fountain that stood almost beyond the limits of hearing.

With that ghost of a sound came a smell that was not native to the library, that was neither the paper of three centuries aging with as many subtly different fragrances as were produced by an array of cheeses, nor the faintest citrus scent of limestone walls, certainly not wood polish or marble wax. This was the half-fresh smell of a half-washed street, and with it came a cool draft not quite strong enough to flutter the pages of the tumbled books on the floor.