Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Of course I already knew, now, that there was something outside.

I scanned, sampled, turning pages cautiously but skimming as quickly as I could, looking for what I needed — something that would explain what had happened to me. Instead, I learned about books that started plagues or imprisoned their readers, and others that, read in the right place and at the right time, would let you cast your mind out to travel the stars. Stories that could leave your mind a husk colonized by parasitic characters, single words that could rewrite memory.

I did not slam the book shut. I closed it, carefully, like the rare archival volume that it was. I could not give up reading, wouldn’t blind myself to what it offered, just because there might be monsters inside.

I hadn’t found anything about tattoos, or stained glass windows — maybe another book would be more relevant. You’ve got to focus when you’re doing research, can’t just let yourself get sucked in by whatever seems shiniest. And “terrifying” is a lot like “shiny.” Libris , with its two-tone paper cover, looked reassuringly pragmatic.

“How did you get ahold of that?” Sherise’s voice, sharp and angry, froze me with my hand on the cover. My eyes shifted toward The Nature of the Word and I felt my cheeks grow hot. But it was Libris that she snatched from my desk.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I found it in the Zs. I was trying to look up something about—” I pushed up my sleeve to show the galaxy tattoo. It was, I realized, the same shape as the stacks, the same colors as the window. And I’d just made my ignorance obvious, too. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“I’m not mad at you.” She ran a finger across the cover, frowning. “But this shouldn’t have been shelved in the regular stacks. A bit past anything you need to be handling, right now.”

“Does it eat your brain?” I felt my cheeks flare again, worse for the knowledge that it showed like a beacon.

She smiled. “Not this one, no. But it’s not translated from any human language, and it’s safer to know what to expect before you get into it.” She tucked it under her arm, though not against bare skin.

At this point, she could tell anyway that I didn’t know what I was doing. Still, it took a few dry swallows before I could get the words out. They were angrier than I’d intended. “Am I supposed to ask? Or am I supposed to figure it out all on my own and hope I don’t unleash a plague on the whole Gulf Coast?”

She leaned against the edge of my desk, put Libris back down, patted the off ending volume a couple of times as if to reassure herself that it was still closed. Then she pushed her cloud of hair away from one ear. The whole outer curve had been sculpted into tiny scallops, like waves of flesh, and faded to cheap newsprint gray. It stood like a scar against the warm brown of the rest of her skin. She let the hair spring back.

“Happened my first day at Crique Foudre. I can hear the books, and hear people and other things thinking when they mean to do harm. Prophecies, sometimes. And people arguing in whispers down the block when I’m trying to sleep. The gifts have sharp edges. There’s no way to know beforehand who can handle it all and who can’t, and we’ve learned the hard way that you have to find out most of it for yourself. If someone explains everything straight up, it always ends badly.”

“Suppose I quit?” I swallowed, because again I hadn’t meant to speak so bluntly, and because I knew the answer. I’d show up at David’s studio, and he’d support me as best he could — no one in Chicago was hard up for librarians — and he wouldn’t criticize me for not being able to cut it in the real world.

“You could do that. The lady before you left at two months — that’s why we were hiring so late in the summer.” Nothing about how I’d leave them in the lurch if I quit just before the semester started, though it didn’t really need saying. “This is riskier than holding down a desk just about anywhere else. The best I can offer is that if you stick around, you’ll become something special. We all do. Whether that special is more like yourself, or less, depends on luck. And on your own choices, at least a little.”

I didn’t know whether I ought to be tempted by the “more” or the “less” — or whether I was even crazier than usual to be tempted by either. “What can you tell me? Without things ending badly?”

She sighed, fidgeted the beads on her earring. I wondered if they drowned out the voices of the books. “That’s always a gamble, but I’ll give it a shot. You know about our patron.”

“Yeah. Although no one’s told me his name. Or her name. I’d think there’d be a plaque or something — is this one of the things it’s dangerous to know?”

“No, he just likes to keep a low profile. You might meet him, one of these days.” She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. “Maybe that’s not the place to start. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like I’ve explained this right to anyone, yet. Maybe this’ll be the time — unless you want me to shut up and let you track it all down for yourself.”

I shook my head, a bit spooked by her uncertainty.

“Well. The universe is a dangerous place. It’s not trying to be dangerous, and it’s full of things that have never heard of humans and wouldn’t much care if they did — but not caring can do at least as much harm as hatred, from things that can break you just passing by. The safest way, for a species that wants time to grow up, is to make a few places that can focus the strangeness, draw it away from everywhere else, and help keep it from getting out of control. People have been doing that on earth for millions of years, maybe longer, each learning from fragments left by those who came before, and doing just a little better as a result. This library is one of those places for humans.”

“Out in—” I just stopped myself from asking what — if she wasn’t just making this up — a vital shield against extinction was doing out in the middle of nowhere, in a state that most of the country couldn’t even bother to protect from floods.

She smiled wryly, making me think I’d been pretty transparent. “Safer this way. Crique Foudre is heir to Zaluski Library in Warsaw. Our patron traveled there in the 1920s, and when the Nazis destroyed it he knew we’d need another one. He thought, a place that isn’t the capital of anywhere or the center of anything — it would be a lot safer from other humans.”

“So we’re the quiet heroes who protect the world from terrible cosmic monsters?” I’d seen that show; I would have been happier to leave it on the screen.

“You’ve been to the edge of the stacks. It’s not that simple. Sometimes we just keep the monsters happy, or distract them, or find a use for them, or study them to learn what else is out there. Sometimes we’re bait. Sometimes we can’t do a damn thing other than watch. And eventually we’ll lose the fight — either to other humans, like Zaluski, or altogether, like the three other species on this world that we know about before us.”

I shivered. “One more thing to worry about.”

“That’s one way to handle it, sure.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I go for distraction, personally. There are so many things to learn here, that you’ll never find in another library that isn’t doing the same work. Things to become. As long as you’re doing your job, the larger cosmic picture kind of takes care of itself, whether or not you grieve over it.”

“Do you ever worry about asteroids?” I asked David. I was home, curled up with my laptop on the couch, insufficiently distracted by my pretty boyfriend.