Glenn Cooper - Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

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?”

Her voice was frigid. “There is no rational explanation for this, Geoffrey.”

“Other than they were awfully clever buggers, wouldn’t you say? I’ll venture they’re the ones in the catacombs. Special treatment for clever buggers. Not going to bury their special lads up in the regular cemetery. Come on, let’s find something more recent, shall we?”

They hunted for a while in the second chamber. Suddenly, Atwood stopped so abruptly that Beatrice bumped him from behind. He let out a low whistle. “Look at this, Beatrice!”

He shined the flashlight beam on a heap of cloth on the ground near the end of a row, a mass of brown and black material, like a load of laundry. They cautiously drew closer until they were looking down on it, shocked by the sight of a fully clothed skeleton lying on its back.

The large straw-colored skull had traces of leathery flesh and some strands of dark hair where the scalp had been. A flat black cap lay next to it. The occipital bone was caved in with a deeply depressed skull fracture, and the stones underneath were rust-stained with ancient blood. The clothing was male: a black, padded, high-collared doublet; brown knee breeches; black hose loose on long bones; leather boots. The body lay on top of a long black cloak, trimmed at the collar with ratty fur.

“This fellow is clearly not medieval,” Atwood mumbled.

Beatrice was already kneeling, taking a closer look. “Elizabethan, I’d say.”

“Are you sure?”

There was a purple silk pouch hanging from the skeleton’s belt, embroidered with the letters J.C. She poked at it with her index finger then gently forced the dry purse strings open, tipping silver coins onto her palm. They were shillings and threepence. Atwood moved his beam closer. The rather masculine profile of Elizabeth I was on the obverse. Beatrice flipped the coin over, and above the coat of arms was crisply stamped: 1581.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” she whispered. “What do you suppose he’s doing here, Geoffrey?”

“I rather think that today’s going to produce more questions than answers,” he responded pensively. His eyes wandered to the stacks above the body. “Look! The nearest books are dated 1581! Surely, no coincidence. We’ll come back to our friend later with the camera gear but let’s finish our quest first.”

They carefully skirted the skeleton and carried on through the stacks until Atwood found what he was looking for.

Fortunately, the 1947 volumes were within arm’s reach, since they had no ladder.

He swept the cases with his beam and exclaimed, “I’ve found it! Here’s where 1947 starts.” He excitedly pulled down volumes until he triumphantly declared, “Today! January thirty-first!”

They sat together on the cold floor, squeezed between the racks, and let the heavy book straddle their laps so that one-half was resting on one of her thighs and one half on his. They scanned page after page of densely-packed names. Natus, Mors, Mors, Natus.

Atwood lost count of the number of pages turned, fifty, sixty, seventy.

Then he saw it, moments before she did: Reginald William Saunders Mors.

The diggers had made the Cunning Man in Fishbourne their local. They could walk to the inn from the excavation site, the beer cheap, and the landlord let them pay a penny per head to use the bathtub in the guest wing. The pub sign, a leering man crouching over a stream catching a trout with his bare hands, never failed to elicit a smile, but not this evening. The diggers sat alone at a long table in the smoky public bar, moodily avoiding the locals.

Reggie checked his timepiece and tried to make light of the matter. “This round’s on me if I can borrow a couple of quid. Pay you back tomorrow, Beatrice.”

She reached into her purse and tossed him a few bills. “Here you go, you big gorilla. You’ll be here to pay me back.”

He snatched the bank notes. “What do you think, Prof? Is it curtains for old Reg?”