Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

“We’ve never met.”

“I think we have.” The man smiled at me. I wasn’t sure what language he was speaking. In the dreamworld, all languages are one and the same and people can understand each other no matter where they’ve come from. “You’re Matthew Freeman. At least, that’s the name you call yourself. You’re one of the Gatekeepers. The first of them, in fact.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No. I’m just the Librarian.”

“I’m looking for Scarlett,” I said. “Scarlett Adams. Has she been here?”

“Scarlett Adams? Scarlett Adams? You mean… Scar! Yes, she most certainly has been here. But not for a long time. And she’s not here now.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“I’m afraid not.”

We were walking down the corridor together, which was strange because I couldn’t remember starting. And we had passed into a second room, part of the library… it was obvious now. I had never seen so many books. There were books on both sides of me, standing like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, packed into wooden shelves that stretched on and on into the distance, finally – a trick of perspective – seeming to come together at a point. The shelves began at floor level and rose all the way to the ceiling, maybe a hundred rows in each block. The air was dry and smelled of paper. There must have been a million books in this room alone and each one of them was as thick as an encyclopaedia.

“You must like reading,” I said.

“I never have time to read the books. I’m too busy looking after them.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Just me.”

“Who built the library?”

“I couldn’t tell you, Matt. It was already here before I arrived.”

“So what are these books? Do you have a crime section? And romance?”

“No, Matt.” The Librarian smiled at the thought. “Although you will find plenty of crime, and plenty of romance for that matter, among their pages. But all the books in the library are biographies.”

“Who of?”

“Of all the people who have ever lived and quite a few who are still to be born. We keep their entire lives here. Their beginnings, their marriages, their good days and their bad days, their deaths – of course. Everything they ever did.”

We stopped in front of a door. There was a sign on it, delicately carved into the wood. A five-pointed star.

“I know this,” I said.

“Of course you do.”

“Where does this door go?”

“It goes anywhere you want it to.”

“It’s like the door at St Meredith’s!” I said.

“It works the same way… but there you have only twenty-four possible destinations. In your world, there are twenty-five doors, all connecting with each other – although none of them will bring you back here. This library, on the other hand, has a door in every room and I have absolutely no idea how many rooms there are and wouldn’t even know how to count them.”

The Librarian gestured with one hand. “After you.”

“Where are we going?”

“Well, since you’re here, why don’t we have a look at your life? Aren’t you curious?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s see…”

We went through the door and for all I knew at that moment we crossed twenty miles to the other side of the city. We found ourselves in a chamber that was certainly very different from the one we had left, with plate-glass windows all around us, held in place by a lattice-work of steel supports. Maybe this was one of the airport terminals I had seen. The books here were on metal shelves, each one with a narrow walkway and a circular platform that moved up and down like a lift but with no cables, no pistons, no obvious means of support.

We went up six levels and shuffled along the ledge with a railing on one side, the books on the other.

“Matt Freeman… Matt Freeman…” The Librarian muttered my name as we went.

“Are they in alphabetical order?” I asked. All the volumes looked the same except that some were thicker than others. I couldn’t see any names or titles.

“No. It’s more complicated than that.”

I looked back at the door that we’d come through. It was now below and behind us. “How do the doors work?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“How do you know where they’ll take you?”

He stopped and turned to look at me. “If you just wander through them, they’ll take you anywhere,” he said. “But if you know exactly where you want to go, that’s where they’ll take you.”

“Can anyone use them?”

“The doors in your world were built just for the five of you.”

“What about Richard?”

“You can each take a companion with you, if you’re so minded. Just remember to decide where you’re going before you step through or you could end up scattered all over the planet.”

We continued on our way but after another couple of minutes, the Librarian suddenly stopped, reached up and took out a book. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you.”

I looked at the book suspiciously. Like all the others it was oversized, bound in some grey fabric, old but perhaps never read. It looked more like a school book than a novel or a biography. I noticed that it had fewer pages than many of the others.

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” The Librarian seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more impressed.

“That’s my whole life?”

“Yes.”

“My whole life up to now…”

“Up to now and all the way to the end.”

The thought of that made my head swim. “Does it say when I die?”

“The book is all about you, Matt,” the Librarian explained patiently. “Inside its pages you will find everything you have ever done and everything you will do. Do you want to know when you next meet the Old Ones? You can read it here. And yes, it will tell you exactly when you will die and in what manner.”

“Are you telling me that someone has written down everything that happens to me before it happens?” I know that was exactly what he had just said but I had to get my head around it.

“Yes.” He nodded.

“Then that means that I’ve got no choice. Everything I do has already been decided.”

“Yes, Matt. But you have to remember, it was decided by you.”

“But my decisions don’t mean anything!” I pointed at the book and suddenly I was beginning to hate the sight of it. “Whatever I do in my life, the end is still going to be the same. It’s already been written.”

“Do you want to read it?” the Librarian asked.

“No!” I shook my head. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it.”

“That’s your choice,” the Librarian said with a sly smile. He slid the book back into the space it had come from. But I had one last question.

“Who wrote the book?” I asked.

“There is no author listed. All the books in the library are anonymous. That’s one of the reasons why it makes them so hard to catalogue.”

I was beginning to feel miserable. The dreamworld seemed to exist to help us, but every time we came here it was simply confusing. Jamie and Pedro had both found this too. “You call yourself a librarian,” I snapped at the man. “So why can’t you be more helpful? Why don’t you have any answers?”

He tapped the spine of the book. “All the answers are here,” he said. “But you just refused to look at them.”

“Then answer me this one question. Am I going to win or lose?”

“Win or lose?”

“Against the Old Ones.” I swallowed. “Am I going to get killed?”

“We are experiencing some turbulence…”

The Librarian was still looking at me, but he hadn’t spoken those words. With a sense of frustration, I felt myself being sucked away. There was someone leaning over me. A member of the cabin crew.