Dry Heat
Drink our words ...
The Online Literary Magazine of Paradise Valley Community College
The Library of Lost Books
a short story
by Morgan Willows
Sandra had wanted to find a particular book but she was fairly certain that she’d walked into a bookshop. This place was not a tiny little corner bookshop, though how she’d come to be in a building which was very clearly a library, she had no idea. Doubly strange was the fact that the place seemed to be endless and, on closer inspection, the shelves the innumerable books sat on appeared to have been grown like trees. A better look around proved she wasn’t in a building at all but a literal forest of bookshelves, carpeted with soft moss and roofed by a high canopy that let sunlight filter softly down. No matter which direction she looked, she saw shelves going on and on farther than she could see; there were even shelves behind her where the young woman was very sure there had been a door that she’d just walked through.
“Ok. Well, I don’t know where my towel is at the moment,” she chuckled nervously, thinking of a bit of advice from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “but I can remember ‘don’t panic’ well enough.” She did a very good job of keeping herself calm and composed despite not feeling much like being either. She tried to puzzle things out logically. If there was a way in, there was a way out; even Narnia, with its habit of kidnapping people when it needed them, always had a way back to where one had come from. It seemed to follow that it was a matter of finding the way out, hopefully without the need to go on an epic quest beforehand.
Sandra walked for hours, her black backpack slung over one shoulder and though she passed shelf after shelf, every one of which was so full of books that some were laying on top of the rows or stacked on the spongy green floor of the aisles, she couldn’t find a door or even a wall for a door to be in. She stopped for a moment where two aisles crossed and set her pack down, taking out a bottle of apple juice and a turkey and cranberry sandwich that she had intended to eat after her job interview. The young woman groaned inwardly, certain that being lost in this place for so long had made her miss her appointment and the human resources guy that she had spoken to on the phone hadn’t sounded like the patient type.
“So much for that job. Bilbo was right, adventures make you late for everything.” Maybe she could call and say she’d missed her bus and would be there as soon as she could; it was technically true, she had gone into the bookshop to wait for the bus instead of standing out in the sun and the summer heat. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, the plastic cat charm dangling merrily from the corner, but she frowned at the little device once the screen lit up.
“No service. What a surprise,” she rolled her eyes and tucked it back into her pocket.
Wondering if there was any organization to this place, Sandra looked around at the various shelves and aisles, hoping to find a sign or a card catalog, anything that would help. Every library she’d ever been in had sections for different genres, subcategories, the good old Dewey Decimal System, some logical way to find the book you were looking for. Surely even magical forest libraries had to have a way to find things.
As she looked at the shelves, several signs appeared that she was certain hadn’t been there before, words spelled out with writhing vines in frames of woven branches. One sign helpfully informed her that historical fiction was to the left while self-help books were to the right and another sign said that she was coming from the direction of biographies and heading toward science fiction. Nothing indicating the direction of an exit. She reached a hand up to twirl a lock of her red hair around her finger thoughtfully and sighed, taking another bite of her sandwich and licking up a bit of cranberry sauce that had squished out onto her hand.
“Well, I was looking for a book. Maybe if I find it, I’ll be able to get out of here,” she muttered to herself, “Some epic quest this is.”
How she was going to find one book in this seemingly endless place wasn’t something she felt like thinking about. Her feet were already sore and who knew how much longer it would take for her to escape. She closed up the juice bottle and put the remaining half of her sandwich back in the plastic baggie and tucked both back into her backpack. If she wasn’t sure how long she was going to be here, best not to go through all of her food at once. She shouldered her bag as she stood and bent slightly to brush the sandwich crumbs off her blue jeans, straightened again to brush off her worn Kansas t-shirt, and then set off to see if she could find something resembling a directory.
Almost as if it had been summoned by her thinking of it, the next break in the shelves she came to was a small open section with a wide desk a leafy sign on the front of which proclaimed it to be the information desk. There was a large leather bound book with a worn hand-written label that read “Inventory” but no staff to be seen, not even a pair of glasses or half-drunk mug of tea to indicate that there was staff at all. The ledger looked much too small to possibly contain all of the titles on the shelves, despite looking like some huge ancient tome that belonged on a church podium, but seeing as an endless library was equally impossible, Sandra was willing to just go with it for the time being.
She stepped over to the desk, her white sneakers squeaking slightly as she stepped from the moss carpeted aisle to the open space tiled with irregular slabs of obsidian, and opened the inventory book, flipping through the pages. As she’d expected, the book was just as strange as the library itself. There was only one book listed per page and strangely no matter how many pages she turned, she never seemed to get any further through the book. She was certainly looking through new pages but there were always the same number of pages left. There didn’t seem to be any order to the books listed; one page listed something from Mysteries, the next a title in Gardening or Art History. The only thing the titles seemed to have in common was that they were all books she had read at some point on her life, even ones she’d borrowed from friends. After a minute or so of searching the contents of the pages changed from books she’d read before to ones she’d only heard about and considered reading. Several entries into this new section she found the page with the book she was looking for: The Element a book by Sir Ken Robinson that several of her friends had recommended. How the inventory knew all of these books, she couldn’t begin to fathom and wasn’t interested in wracking her brains for possible answers at the moment. The inventory listed the book she needed as being in the Education section of Non-fiction and helpfully gave directions to it from her current position.
“Finally, something helpful. Thank you,” she said, though she immediately chided herself for talking to a book, however helpful. “If I stay here much longer, I’m going to lose my mind entirely.”
Sandra closed the inventory book, took a moment to be sure she knew what direction she was going, and then headed off through the shelves once again. It took much longer than she thought it would and several times she was certain she’d gotten lost but she did finally find the right shelf which was lined end to end and top to bottom with various helpful titles of every sort from homeschooling guides to career training manuals and of course a well-worn copy of The Element. She picked it off the shelf, flipping through it casually for a moment. It had always been something of a habit of hers to look through a book, picking a random page and reading a paragraph or two to be sure it was the right book for her. Inside the front cover of the book was a little pocket with an old fashioned library checkout card tucked inside; Sandra found her name and a due date already stamped on the card. Hardly the oddest thing she’d encountered in her time here. Curious, she took the card out and glanced at the back of it, expecting to find only more slot for due date but instead finding some kind of loan policy which read:
A notice from the Library of Lost Books.
Thank you for patronizing our establishment. If you have found yourself in the Library it is because you are an earnest reader and a true friend of books. Once you have found your book, you may take it home and keep it. There is no need to advise the desk as all checkouts are automatically logged when you leave and there is no desk to advise in the first place. Be aware that all books which are not yours that are borrowed from the Library will return of their own accord once the due date has passed. Good Luck and Happy Reading.
Sandra’s brow furrowed a little as she regarded the notice curiously. It was certainly informative; now she at least knew where she was… sort of. She’d never heard of the place before and was fairly certain that it wasn’t the sort of place that you could find on a map. The name of the place was equally mystifying. Lost Books? Lost from where? They all seemed to be perfectly ‘found’ right here on the shelves. After a moment she decided that nothing in the notice was any stranger than anything else she’d encountered in the place, so she tucked the card back into its little pocket and put the book into her backpack. She turned and went back the way she had come, frowning when she found only more of the never ending shelves.
“That’s odd,” Sandra mused, “the information desk should be right here.” She frowned and crossed her arms with an irritated grumble. “Ok, oh great and powerful Library,” she said sarcastically to the air, “How do I get out of here? The card said I could go once I had the book. Let me out already.”
A shelf creaked.
Nothing else happened.
Sandra made a very aggravated noise and stomped off through the aisles, grumbling under breath. She wandered for a few more hours –at least she thought it was a few more hours- pausing for a few minutes to finish her sandwich at one point, thinking the entire time that it was a bad idea but she was too hungry to eat any less. Eventually, after pausing in several places to investigate particularly interesting looking covers, she found herself wandering around Fantasy and absently browsed through the books there. It had always been her favourite genre; dragons and wizards, fairy tales and grand adventures. One book caught her attention: a battered paperback copy of American Gods, her favourite Neil Gamain book. Sandra had had a copy years ago but had misplaced it while moving, or perhaps let a friend borrow it and forgotten whom she’d lent it to, or maybe left it at the campus one day. Come to think of it, she honestly couldn’t remember where the book had gotten to or when she’d lost track of it. She picked it off the shelf, running her fingers over the often-creased spine and the cover which was covered in little scuffs and scratches, the bottom corner was torn off and another tear halfway up had been repaired with a piece of clear tape. It looked exactly like the copy she’d misplaced.
“But it can’t be the one I lost. My copy had a little smiley face drawn on the title pa- oh.” She stopped as she turned to the title page and found a little smiley face in the corner drawn in blue ink, presumably put there by whoever had owned it before she’d found it sitting on the bench at a bus stop. Sandra was so surprised she nearly dropped the book. “This… this is my copy, but how…” she marveled quietly as she flipped through the well-loved pages of the book she’d so treasured. There was no checkout card in this book. It was hers and she could take it home to keep. “Lost Books,” she whispered, looking around at the innumerable shelves, at the books they held, and for a moment she felt very sad with the realization that all of them had been owned and loved by someone. The sadness was tempered slightly by a sliver of happiness that, although they’d been lost by the people they belonged to, they had a safe home here on the shelves of the Library until their owners came to find them again.
Sandra smiled and put her book in her backpack, glad to have found it and silently promising that she would never lose it again. Why she was making promises to a book she wasn’t entirely sure but it hardly mattered. Once she had the book tucked safely into her bag, she resumed her quest for an exit. Surprisingly she found a set of double doors just beyond the next few shelves. It had seemingly appeared there the same way the information desk had and a small sign on a root-like stand beside the doors told her to have a nice day in neat, friendly vine lettering. She pushed the door open and stepped out onto the street, the same street she’d been walking down before her little adventure, leaving the Library of Lost Books behind. She wondered if she was late for her interview but when she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket to check the time, she found that she still had three hours left before her appointment. Plenty of time to read a little of her favourite book.