The earth rumbled suddenly, conjuring that soft earthquake he’d experienced before in the same parking lot. It was much shorter this time. The car shook a couple of times and then it stopped.
“You know anything about that whale thing?” Loki asked.
“I’m sleeping,” Nine said. “I can’t talk while I’m asleep.”
Loki pulled the blanket tighter around him before he found himself in a fistfight with a cat.
“But I think the whale had a big meal,” Nine continued, even though he had confessed to trying to sleep. “That’s why its stomach grumbles sometimes. I always wonder what will happen if the whale decided to roll on its other side. You think this is how Atlantis was wiped off the face of the map?”
“I’m asleep,” Loki moaned playfully.
“Oh, sorry, nighty, Loco,” Nine said. “You’ll be alright. Just follow your bliss.”
An hour later, Loki woke up to find the cat tucked underneath his blanket, sleeping comfortably on his chest. When he lifted the blanket a little, he saw a squirrel had sneaked in, too, and slept beside it.
“Sneaky devils,” Loki smiled.
They were both snoring. Loki didn’t mind. He needed the company of safe creatures.
***
In the morning, Loki showed Nine and the squirrel the way out, then he noticed he’d received a message on his phone. It was from Axel:
Meet me in Bedtime Stoories, Rumpelstein High’s library. I found evidence she is the real Snow White, and that she’s always been a vampire. Someone forged the original stories and replaced them with pancake fairy tales.
P.S. Burn after reading
***
Rumpelstein High’s library, Bedtime Stoories, was bigger from the inside than it measured from the outside. It was humongous. Loki speculated it was even bigger than the school itself, which didn’t make sense, like almost everything else in this town.
Axel had showed Loki into the library, bragging about how no one attending or working at Rumpelstein High cared about it or its books.
“Every commercial book you need, you can find on the internet. You can download it with a click of a button and a drop of blood from your credit card,” Axel had said. “It’s that simple. Only the real books, the ones that haven’t been forged or re-edited are found somewhere inside Bedtime Stoories. Those are the old, dusty, handwritten books with yellow pages and the smell of age on them. Those are the books people think they don’t need anymore. We’re smarter, because those are exactly the books we need to solve our mystery.”
The library was dimly lit, and it became darker with every step. Hundreds of books were stacked on the shelves on both sides, buried under thick layers of dust and spider webs. The floor underneath Loki creaked as if no one had been there for ages. He wished he’d find someone reading a book, but nobody was there. The library was suspiciously vacant. It was like a haunted house, only with thousands of books. It seemed that Axel was right when he said that no one used it anymore.
A spiral staircase in the middle led to a second pitch-dark floor. Loki tried to catch up with Axel who walked silently but fast, hurrying between the tables and shelves like a rat on rollerblades. Loki thought he saw him turn right between the shelves somewhere.
While looking for Axel, Loki finally saw someone sitting by a dusty table, burying his head behind a large book. He couldn’t see his face, but white silvery hair was showing from above the book’s cover. Scanning lower under the table, Loki saw that someone was tapping an impatient foot against the floor. Scanning upward again, he saw two holes in the book the library patron was holding. Two pairs of eyes stared back at him from behind the holes. Loki looked away, and followed Axel.
“Hey,” Axel whispered from behind the shelves. Loki saw two grey eyes looking at him from between the books. “In here,” Axel said.
Silently, Loki walked around the shelves into a darker area. “Where are you, Axel?”
“Right here,” Axel ordered him to follow him deeper into the dark.
“I think I saw someone reading a book with holes in it,” Loki said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Axel said, not looking back. “It’s Skeliman the Ferryman.” Axel said, the light from his phone shining in the dark. “I read something interesting about him this morning. It turned out he stopped working as a ferryman in the Swamp of Sorrow. That’s why we didn’t come across him yesterday. He guards Bedtime Stoories now. His new name is Skeliman the Libraryman.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I think they pay him more in the library. That’s why he likes it in here. They say you just have to act like he isn’t there when you see him, and he will not harm you. It’s rumored that he’s engrossed in reading children books about wizards and witches, and forgot all about his job. That’s why the library is a mess.”
“You said he was blind,” Loki said. “That he had empty sockets because he was a skeleton, so how can he read?”