Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead

From a distant corner they heard the others urgently shouting, "Professor, come here. We've found a catacombs!"

"There's hundreds of skeletons, maybe thousands!"

"Goes on forever!"

Atwood couldn't answer. Reggie took a few steps back to make sure his boss was all right. He leaned over, helped the older man to his feet and boomed out in his loudest military baritone, "Sod the skeletons, you lot! You'd all better come over here 'cause you're not going to believe what we've got ourselves into."

Atwood's first thought was that he was dead, that he had inhaled some toxic vapors and died. He wasn't a religious man but this had to be some sort of otherworldly experience.

No, this was real. If the first chamber was the size of a theater, the second was the size of an airline hangar. To his left, a mere ten feet from the door, was a vast wooden case, filled with enormous leather-bound volumes. To his right was an identical stack, and in between the two was a corridor just wide enough for a man to pass. Atwood recovered his senses and traced one stack with his flashlight to understand its dimensions. It was about fifty feet long, some thirty feet high, and consisted of twenty shelves. He did a rapid count of the number of books on just one shelf: about 150.

All of his nerve endings tingled as he wandered into the central corridor. To both sides were huge bookcases, identical to the first pair, and they seemed to go on and on into the darkness.

"Shitload of books in here," Reggie said.

Somehow, Atwood had hoped that the first words spoken on the occasion of one of the great discoveries in the history of archaeology might have been more profound. Had Carter, at the mouth of Tutankhamen's tomb heard, "Shitload of stuff in here, mate?" Nevertheless, he had to agree.

"I should say so."

He violated his own no-touch rule and put his pointer finger softly against the spine of one book on an eye-level shelf at the end of the third stack. The leather was firm and in excellent preservation. He carefully wiggled it out.

It was heavy, at least the heft of a five-pound bag of flour, about eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, five inches thick. The leather was cool, shiny, unadorned by any markings on the covers but in the spine he saw a large, clear number deeply tooled into the leather: 833. The parchments were rough-cut, slightly uneven. There had to be two thousand pages.

Reggie and Beatrice were by his side. Both aimed their lights on the book he cradled in the crook of his arm. He gently opened it to a random page.

It was a list. Names, by the look of the three columns across a page, some sixty names per column. In front of each name was a date, all of them 231833. Following each name was the word Mors or Natus. "It's some kind of registry," Atwood whispered. He turned the page-more of the same. An endless list. "Have you any thoughts on this, Bea?" he asked.

"Looks like it's a record of births and deaths, like any medieval parish church might keep," she replied.

"Rather a lot of them, wouldn't you say?" Atwood said, sending his beam down the long central corridor.

The others had caught up and were murmuring at the library entrance. Atwood called back to them to stay put for the moment. He failed to notice that Reggie had started down the corridor, deeper into the chamber.

"How old would you say this vault is?" Atwood asked Beatrice.

"Well, judging from the stone work, the door construction, and the lock hardware, I'd have to say eleventh, maybe twelfth century. I'd hazard a guess we're the first living souls to breathe this air in about eight hundred years."

From a hundred feet away Reggie's voice echoed out to them. "If bossy-boots is so bloody smart then how come I've got a book here what got dates in it for the sixth of May 1467?"

They needed a generator. Despite their fevered excitement, Atwood decided it was too hazardous to do further exploration in the dark. They retraced their steps and emerged into the late afternoon glare, then hurriedly covered the opening to the spiral stairs with planks and a tarp, then an inch of dirt so the casual observer like Abbot Lawlor would notice nothing. Atwood admonished them. "No one is to speak a word of this to anyone. Anyone!"

They returned to their camp and Reggie took a couple of the lads to find a generator somewhere on the island. Atwood holed up in his caravan to furiously make an entry into his notebook, and the rest of them talked among themselves in hushed tones over a simmering lamb stew.

After sundown, the van returned. They had found a builder in Newport who hired them a portable generator. They also procured several hundred feet of electrical line and a crate of lightbulbs.

Reggie opened up the back of the van for the professor's inspection. "Reginald delivereth," he declared proudly.

"He always seems to," Atwood said, patting the big man on the back.

"This is big, isn't it, boss?"

Atwood was subdued; the experience of writing his diary left him nervously deflated. "You always dream of finding something very important. Something that changes the landscape, as it were. Well, old man, I fear this might be too big."

"How d'ya mean?"

"I don't know, Reg. I must tell you, I have a bad feeling."

They spent the entire next morning firing up the generator and stringing the underground structures with incandescent lights. Atwood decided that photography was the first order of business, so he deployed Timothy and Martin to shoot the scriptorium chamber, Ernest and Dennis to shoot the catacombs, and he and Beatrice photographed the library. Flashbulbs popped incessantly, and their ozone smell permeated the musty air. Reggie acted as roving electrician, laying wire, tinkering with misbehaving bulbs, and tending the generator, which chugged away aboveground.

By mid-afternoon they had discovered that the vast library was only the first of two. At the rear of the first chamber was a second one, presumably built, they reckoned, at a later date when space was exhausted. The second vault was as enormous as the first, 150 feet square, at least thirty feet in height. There were sixty pairs of long, tall bookcases in each chamber, each pair separated by a narrow central passage. Most of the stacks were crammed with thick tomes, except for a few cases at the back of the second room, which were empty.

After they had done a cursory exploration of the boundaries of the vaults, Atwood did a rough calculation in his notebook and showed the numbers to Beatrice. "Bloody hell!" she said. "Are these right?"

"I'm not a mathematician, but I believe they are."

The library contained nearly 700,000 volumes.

"That would make this one of the ten largest libraries in Britain," Beatrice said.

"And I daresay, the most interesting. So, shall we make a stab at why medieval monks-if that's who they were-were rather compulsively writing down names and dates from the future?" He clapped his notebook shut and the sound of it echoed for a couple of beats.

"I didn't get much sleep thinking about that," Beatrice admitted.

"Nor I. Follow me."

He led her into the second room. They hadn't strung wire very far into this chamber, and Beatrice stayed close to him, both of them following the sickly yellow light cast from his flashlight. They plunged deeply into the dark stacks, where he stopped and tapped on a spine: 1806.

He moved to another row. "Ah, getting closer, 1870." He kept going, glancing at the dates on the spines until finally, "Here we go, 1895, a very good year."

"Why?" she asked.

"Year I was born. Let's see. Move that light closer, would you? No, need to go a bit earlier, this one starts in September."

He put the book back and tried a few adjacent ones till he exclaimed, "Aha! January, 1895. It was my birthday a fortnight ago, you know. Here we go, January fourteenth, lots of names. Gosh! This thing has every language under the sun! There's Chinese, Arabic, English, of course, Spanish…Is that Finnish?-I believe that's Swahili, if I'm not mistaken." His finger moved an inch over the columns until it stopped. "By God, Beatrice! Look here! 'Geoffrey Phillip Atwood 14 1 1895 Natus.' There I am! There I bloody am! How in Hades did they know that Geoffrey Phillip Atwood was going to be born on January 14, 1895?"