Caveat Lector
an excerpt

51: a task to do

Clara is in the hospital wing. Edgar wants to go up and see how she’s doing, but he’s got something he needs to do here, first. If he doesn’t do it, he figures Clara will probably kill him.

The thing that the boys were provoking, pretending to be in danger from, is still in the library somewhere. And the boys will be back, probably with a teacher, and they’ll demand that the place is searched and the dangerous thing found. They’ll probably pass it off as a rabid dog or something. Even so, it’s up to Edgar to make sure that the thing isn’t around for anybody to find.

If they find it, they’ll shut the library down. They’ll declare it a dangerous place to be. Edgar feels a deep wrongness twist up in his gut at the thought of that.
There’s only one way out of the library. Edgar knows that. And he also knows that the thing, whatever it is, can’t use that door, because it can’t leave. But sometimes students do come in here, so he figures better safe than sorry, and he closes both of the doors and locks them with the key that Clara pressed into his hand.

Then he takes a deep breath. Lets it out.

He’s alone. He’s alone in the library. Light.

But it’s okay, he can handle this. He knows what he has to do.

First off, he has to find a particular book.

He scans the aisles. There are a few books laying, scattered, and he figures they probably fell off of the cart when the thing was chasing them. None of them strike him as being the right one, though.

He cautiously threads his way through the shelves. For the first time since he started working here, he’s telling his front-brain to shut up. He’s thinking with his back-brain now. It feels good.

His back-brain tells him that he doesn’t need to bother looking through each of the books that he finds. It’s directing him, firmly, towards... oh, damn, of all the places in the library for the thing’s book to end up, it would have to be at the bottom of the book avalanche. The one he’d accidentally caused. Edgar winces involuntarily. His back-brain can hear the complaints coming from the books in the piles.

Which should be weirder than it is, Edgar thinks. His front brain wants to freak out about it, but right now he’s feeling like his front brain can go stuff itself. His back-brain seems to be doing all right for itself.

Edgar can hear the voices coming from the books. The low hum that he’d heard since that first day, when he’d been sworn into this bizarre-o office, except for magnified. Now he can tell what the hum is, can hear the way that it’s a hundred thousand different voices all woven together, whispering back and forth to one another about as many topics as there were shelves to hold them. He can pick out individual exchanges, if he listens hard enough. Each book has its own voice, its own set of ideas.

And that’s surprisingly... cool.

The books can talk. The books can talk. The books are full of ideas (some good, some bad, some dangerous) just waiting to be brought to life. Edgar can hear that, and see that, and he thinks that it’s damn cool.

He heads over to the avalanche and crouches down. “I’m really sorry about this,” he tells the books. They don’t seem to get him. He thinks sorry / sorry / sorry at them and this time he can tell that they’re mollified, somewhat.

The books can hear him when thinks. He grins.

He closes his eyes and listens harder to what they books in the pile are saying. Most of them are just complaining about the fact that they’re in a pile on the floor-- they’re attached to their shelves, the books are. No wonder Clara’s so fastidious about the shelving every morning.

But there’s one book that’s not complaining-- it’s hurt. It’s open and it’s bleeding and Edgar actually gasps because he can feel it, he can feel the total wrongness of the situation. He can feel the way that it’s empty. Because a book without any of the ideas that make it up, Edgar realizes, is like a person missing a limb or a part of their soul.

He reaches out a hand without opening his eyes, picks out the screaming book, and pulls it close.

So that’s how Clara does it. Huh. Explains a lot.

“Let’s find your missing piece, shall we?” he asks the book, and he’s still grinning, even though it can’t be easy, what the book is going through. This feels so great. He feels like maybe he can fly.

He looks at the spine of the book-- The Castle of Amantiado. The cover shows an imposing, dark fortress shrouded in fog.

Edgar lets his back-brain do the steering, just like he did that first day in here, when he’d come to find a book for Hausman’s english class. There’s something out there among the shelves that doesn’t belong, and he’s going to find it. He’s going to find it, and he’s going to fix it.

And then he turns a corner and there it is.

The thing is just as huge as it had been the first time, but this time it’s settled against one of the shelves and it looks... smaller. Like it’s trying to draw in on itself. Scared, supplies Edgar’s back-brain, the part of him that’s good at this kind of thing.

“Hey,” Edgar says, softly. The thing snaps its weird, green eyes up at him. “Hey,” Edgar says, again. “It’s okay now.”

He holds the book out in front of him, moving slowly. He shows the thing the cover, opens it wide, lets him see the pages. Home.

“You’re not where you belong, huh?” He thinks about this in simple, universal terms; away from home / frightened / lonely.

The think glowers at him, not trusting. Hurt / fear / hunt on the moors / torture with sharp knives, Edgar hears. He looks at the book in his hands and decides that he doesn’t really want to read it all that badly.

“Yeah, I know. Those guys, they really scared you, didn’t they? Bringing you out here like that. This isn’t where you want to be, I can tell.” bad men / frightened you / took you away from home / longing.

The thing nods its massive head.

“Yeah,” says Edgar, like this is normal. Like he talks down big, ink-and-paper nightmare creatures all the time. “Yeah, okay. It’s all right now. Those guys are gone-- they’re taken care of, okay?” justice was done / bad men punished / homecoming

“You can go home now.”

Slowly, Edgar takes a few steps forward. He bends over, sets the book down on the ground, open. He steps back.

“It’s okay. You can go home now. Nobody’s going to hurt you anymore.”

The thing looks at him, quivering, potential for motion. Edgar knows that looks. It grabs something deep inside of him and twists, and he wonders how he could ever have forgotten this, ever have stopped believing in a world where magic was real and such things were always possible, potential in the air just waiting to happen.

The thing murmurs gratitude at him, and then it’s barely two steps on its powerful legs before it’s suspended, just above the open book, and it dissolves into a million letters that fall back into their rightful places on the page. The books tops screaming. Edgar listens, carefully, and all he can hear is thank you.

“You’re welcome,” he says, picking up the book and shutting it. He can tell without looking where it needs to go, a place right in the middle of the shelf the thing had been curled up to. He puts it there.

He feels fantastic.