“She’s the sneakiest?” asked Dawson.
We walked out into the night, doing our best not to skulk. Dawson wore a wool coat with a fine, large hood; the rest of us bundled up as well, and I didn’t think the unusual mix of our party would be noticeable in the sliver of dim moonlight. Charlie provided a good excuse should anyone recognize us: we dropped him at the guest dorm on our way.
Crowther Library loomed in silhouette, more obviously a fortress than in daylight hours. Crenellations and ornate towers stretched above bare oak branches. Windows glinted like eyes. The walls looked ancient, malignant, made smug by the hoard of knowledge cloistered within.
I shook my head sharply: I needed to be fully awake and sensible. But I didn’t feel caught in the paranoia that sometimes strikes on the boundary of sleep. Instead I felt the alertness that comes in the presence of a feral shark. If seeing the library as a living foe helped me do what was required, so be it.
Dawson led us away from the imposing front entrance to an ordinary steel door in one of the distant wings. The key turned easily, letting us into a cool, plaster-walled corridor shadowed by emergency lighting. There could be no excuse for our presence now. But even straining, I heard no sound other than our own breath and footsteps, and the mindless whisper of ducts and pipes.
Dawson promised that she knew the way: she’d explored every corner of the labyrinthine building as Skinner’s research needs (and her own, covered by his) demanded. While she hadn’t previously been in after hours, she’d taken advantage of connections among the staff to gain access to less public areas. We stayed out of the common sections, keeping to back halls and storerooms. I did my best not to let unease shape my gait.
We came at last to the dusty heart of the restricted stacks. Dawson’s key ring gave us passage through further, older locks, into rows upon rows of plain hardwood shelves. These were filled with antiquarian books, ragged journals, even a few cased scrolls. Endplates coded their contents as long strings of numbers, but more comprehensible handwritten notations appended them: Orne Bequest, Derleth Collection, University-Sponsored Expedition Records 1890–1915, Eibon copies—reserved by Prof. Peaslee. At one end of the room, caged in glass, the library’s original copy of the Necronomicon lay closed on its stand. I drifted closer—not too close, for it was guarded not only by locks, but by complex signs and diagrams and what I suspected was a pressure sensor in the pedestal beneath. The book itself was one of the impressive seventeenth-century editions, bound in ornately etched black leather with silver-edged pages, and doubtless illuminated by hand.
“Here,” said Dawson softly. A spiral staircase led to further levels. The iron shook beneath us as we followed her up. We passed a second floor, where wooden doors studded the walls on all sides, and came out in the shadows of the third and final of the library’s most forbidden rooms.
Here, at last, we found our books. Along one whole side of the level, the shelf notations read simply “Innsmouth Collection.” I stopped in the middle of the floor.
Audrey touched my elbow. “Aphra?”
My eyes felt tight in their sockets. “I’ll be all right.” Caleb was already among the shelves, and I forced myself to move.
Had the books been in my charge, I’d have organized them by family and household, by books for home or temple, books for teaching and meditation and cooking. This last they’d made a start on: they’d segregated the clearly Aeonist texts from books that could be found in any town, and relegated the journals to the far side of the farthest bookcase. But within that first category, either they had only the vaguest understanding of each volume’s contents, or interpreted them through some filter I couldn’t begin to comprehend. They had managed to sort by title: copies of the Book of Eibon clustered nearest the dumbwaiter, probably the reason we’d gotten three the first day.
When I looked closer, I saw that they’d placed markers in front of the books we’d requested. I frowned. It made sense, but felt deeply intrusive. Did they seek some pattern in our requests that would reveal the books’ secrets—or ours? Then again, given the collection’s poor organization, it might simply ensure that they could return each book to its assigned spot.
Would they notice if I took one out to look at? Some of the shelves were very dusty. Even the breeze of our passage might leave trails. The journals, though, should already be well-disturbed by our recent requests, and by the librarian’s willingness to bring whole stacks to the reading room.
As hoped, I found the journals disordered and the dust around them thoroughly smeared. Caleb stood at the aisle’s end, sharing one of Chulzh’th’s volumes with Audrey and Dawson. Audrey kept her voice low, but I could hear the suppressed energy as she described our elders to—Deedee, should I call her now? We’d ridden each other’s blood, but the remaining barriers between us were hers to preserve or remove.
I checked notebooks carefully, but quickly. I hungered for well-known names, or familiar handwriting. Some of the books, yellow and pungent with age, bore dates from the 1600s and earlier. Sections in English were barely comprehensible; in Enochian and R’lyehn the dialect had barely altered. I found Marshes and Eliots, Waites and Gilmans, along with the more diverse names of the smaller and poorer families—but no one closer than a distant cousin.
And then—in one of the common five-and-dime notebooks, familiar handwriting indeed. My own, my childhood scrawl. I clasped the book against me, afraid to look, then did so anyway. The first entries were from 1923; I’d been seven. My script was still shaky, wavered above and below lines as it complained of Caleb’s infant irritations and exulted over classroom triumphs and favored desserts. My spelling was excellent. I wanted to curl around myself or cry; I did neither, though my whole body felt taut with the distance between myself and myself.
Surely one’s childhood concerns must be hard to encounter decades later, regardless of the life fallen between. Must invoke yearning and repulsion inextricably mixed.
Caleb saw me standing motionless. “What did you find?”
“My diary,” I said. Then added, knowing the absurdity: “It’s private, no brothers allowed.”
He snorted, but sobered quickly. “I’d just started my first. When the raid came.”