Every House Is Haunted (11 page)

He reached up and pulled down a large book. It was bound in leather that was cracking in several spots. The pages were yellow and uneven, some of them sticking out unevenly, as if the book had been constructed in haste, or maybe by a publisher who didn’t know his craft. There was no title on the cover, which was withered and shrunk like the skin on some strange dried fruit. It was a heavy volume, and he carried it over to the reading table with both hands, holding it close to his chest. He breathed deeply and inhaled a musky aroma of mildew and millennia.

The redhead came over and stood behind him on his left side. She watched over his shoulder as he opened the book. The first page was blank. He turned to the next page, and it was blank, too. He flipped further ahead, then back again. They were all blank.

“Is this a joke?” he asked.

“Keep going,” she said. Her breathing was faster and deeper.

He continued to turn the pages. After a few moments of finding nothing but more blank pages, he looked up and saw someone standing in the doorway. She was a short elderly woman who would have looked at home in a country kitchen baking banana bread. She was plump in that pleasant way only elderly women seem able to pull off. She had a round, friendly face and her grey hair was done up in a tall Tower of Babel beehive that almost reached the top of the doorway.

“Spank my ass and call me Betty!” she cried out in a voice that seemed incongruously soft compared to the words she had spoken. “What have you got this poor, young man doing? Are you mad, woman?”

“I’m in the middle of his orientation.” The redhead’s voice remained cool and calm, but the man in the bathrobe detected something beneath that polished surface . . . something that sounded a bit like fear.

“I need to speak with you,” the old woman said urgently. Her eyes moved fretfully between them.

The redhead let out a frustrated sigh. “Keep looking,” she said to the man in the bathrobe, and went around the table to talk to the old woman.

The man watched them. He tried to figure out what they were saying, but they spoke in low, hushed voices. He looked back at the book, expecting to see another blank page, and saw this instead:

DO YOU SEE RED?

The lettering was so ornate he almost couldn’t read it. The first three words were printed in black ink, while the fourth word,
RED
, was printed in red. So he supposed he was seeing red.

He looked up from the book, and he was seeing red again. The redhead. He looked back down at the book, and the words had changed. Now they said:

DO YOU SEE HER BLOOD?

This time the word
BLOOD
was printed in red—and not just red, but
dripping
red. The ink (if that’s what it was) was running down the page in thin rills like . . . well, like blood.

He raised his head and started to say something to the redhead, but she cut him off with a briskly upraised hand. He looked down at the book again, and the word
HER
was bleeding now. He looked up at the redhead and then back down at the book, and what he saw written there this time was enough to cause his breath to catch in his throat.

DO YOU WANT TO?

He stared at this question, feeling a strange species of shock, not because he was looking at a book that appeared to be writing itself before his very eyes, but because a part of him
did
want to see her blood. It was a small part, to be sure, but it was there, and he could feel it growing within him like a tumour.

As he continued to stare at the page, the words changed . . . unravelled . . . as if they were made of string. The black and red lines streaked across the page like contrails. Reaching the top of the page, they began to move in more purposeful manoeuvres—loops and curlicues and smooth curves that seemed to have no meaning at first. He soon realized that this was because they were not forming words this time, but a picture. The black lines were becoming the portrait of a woman’s face—
her
face—while the red lines spun themselves like eldritch silk into her hair. The finished product was a simple but perfectly executed sketch of the redhead.

Below the sketch, the black lines that formed her long, slender neck began to unravel. They sagged down like falling spiderwebs and twined together to form words:

OPEN HER UP

They unravelled again and reformed.

SEE HER BLOOD

The man let out a low sigh that was almost a moan. He felt nauseated. His legs threatened to buckle and spill him to the floor. There was something stupidly evil about those words. They reminded him of those children’s readers, the ones that told the adventures of Dick and Jane and their dog Spot.
See Dick run. Run, Dick run
. Except this was the adult version.
Open her up. See her blood
.

Scarier than the thought of a book that not only wrote itself but wrote such horrific things, was that growing desire to do exactly what it said. It was a desire strong enough to be considered lust—bloodlust. He lusted to open her up and see her blood. But another part, one that seemed to be growing smaller and distant with each passing moment, told him it was wrong, it was inhuman. That other voice was like a transmission sent from deep space; it was becoming more garbled and incoherent as he stared at the book.

He shut his eyes tightly, counted to five, and opened them again, hoping the words would be gone. They were, but new ones replaced them.

STOP THINKING ABOUT IT AND DO IT!

The letters unravelled (more harshly this time, almost impatiently) and reformed, except now they were in a jagged, less attractive script.

KILL HER! OPEN HER UP!

The man in the bathrobe looked up from the book. The desire was like a bushfire burning in his head. It was, he realized, the best idea he had ever had in his life—the only idea, really. It was so great that he couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t thought of it before. It didn’t matter. It was there now, beating a poisonous pulse in the centre of his mind. He could feel the vein in the middle of his forehead standing out like some strange brand. He could see himself doing it. Dragging her down to the floor, driving his hands into the smooth pale skin of her chest, ripping, tearing, punching through her ribcage and then pulling it open like an old book. He could even hear the sound it would make: a crunching, ratcheting sound like a key turning in a lock.

He slammed the book shut with a loud, portentous boom. His hands were slick with perspiration, and he could feel drops of sweat running down the sides of his face. Part of him wanted to open the book again—the same part that wanted to take the redhead apart like a Thanksgiving turkey—but it was becoming the dimmer voice now, the one moving farther down the dark tunnel of his mind.

Gradually, he felt his mind reasserting itself. He took a deep, steadying breath and let it out.
See Dick walk
, he thought as he went around to the other side of the table. The redhead and the old woman had finished talking. The old woman gave him a fretful look, then turned and left the room.

“Well,” the redhead said in a bright, cheery voice, “where were we?”

She walked over to the table and placed her hand on the book, fingers tented on the cover. The man winced a bit when she did that. He hadn’t liked touching the book himself, and watching someone else do it wasn’t much better. It was like watching someone stick their hand in a terrarium full of tarantulas.

“What do you think?” she asked.

The man looked at her quizzically. “About what?” he asked.

“About the rising gas prices,” she said seriously. Then she laughed and shook her head. “About the book, of course.” She tapped the cover and the man felt his stomach do a backflip. “What did it say to you?”

The man opened his mouth but nothing came out.

“Did it say
Hello
? Did it say
Mars Needs Toilet Paper
? Did it tell you to save air miles?” A strange little smile crept across her face. “Did it tell you to kill yourself? Or Lorna? Or me?”

“Who’s Lorna?” he asked.

The redhead nodded toward the door. “The librarian,” she said. “She’s also your driver.”

“My driver?”

“She’ll take you home shortly. We’re almost done here.”

“We are?”

“Yes.”

“How does she know where I live?” he asked suddenly. “
I
don’t even know where I live? Or who I am! What the hell is going on here?
Who are you people?
”

The redhead continued to smile. “What did it say to you?” she asked again.

“Can you please not do that?” He was looking at her hand, the one resting on the cover of the book. “Can you . . . take your hand away? Please?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, sounding genuinely sorry, and took her hand off the book. “Now, can you tell me . . .?”

“It said I should kill you!”
the man in the bathrobe cried out in horror and shame. “It said I should open you up . . . open you up so I could see your blood.”

“Did it now,” the redhead said in a musing tone. The expression on her face was not one of fear or anger or disgust, but of thoughtful amusement. She suddenly let out a loud, full-bodied laugh and gave her head a rueful little shake, the kind that says
Oh well, boys will be boys
.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “That book has said worse things to me. A lot worse. Sticks and stones.” She glanced over her shoulder at the row of bookcases. “They all have.”

The man followed her glance. “Are they all like that?” he asked incredulously.

The strange little smile reappeared on her face. “Oh yes,” she said. “Of course, some are worse than others.”

“God,” he muttered in a low voice.

“Gods, actually,” the redhead corrected him. She shook her head in good-natured reproof. “It never fails to amaze me the number of people who think there’s only one. It’s such a small-minded view.”

“Those things . . . they’re not books.”

“Nope,” she said. “You’ve heard the expression ‘Never judge a book by its cover’? Around here it’s sort of a warning. If I could, I’d put it in neon letters about five feet high right above those bookcases.”

“Then, what are they?”

“I could tell you,” she said conspiratorially, “but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Really?”

She spread her hands and grinned. “No,” she said. “It’s difficult to explain. It helps if you think of them as phone cards.”

“Phone cards?”

“
Inter-dimensional
phone cards,” she clarified.

“Reach out and summon someone,” the man in the bathrobe said in a dazed monotone.

“Yes!” The redhead laughed and clapped her hands together. She picked up the book, carried it back to the stacks, and reshelved it. Then she pulled the long glass cover down and locked it back in place. “You won’t have to look at one of them ever again. I can assure you of that. I just wanted you to understand the gravity of the situation.” She saw that he was about to speak and raised her hand. “Yes, yes, I realize you don’t
know
what’s going on, but some part of you understands. Doesn’t it?”

The man swallowed dryly. “I suppose I do at that,” he said. “Although I don’t see what good it is to understand something I don’t know about.”

“That’s all right,” the redhead assured him. “It’s not your business to know. From time to time you will be brought here to open the Restricted Collection. Once you’ve opened the door, you’re free to wait in the outer hall. There’s a coffee machine that’s quite respectable.” She saw the look of frustration on his face and added: “You’re not going to remember any of this anyway. Clean wipe, kitty-cat. I promise.”

“Are those books . . . are they safe here?”

“This is one of the largest university libraries in the world. They’re very safe here.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel safe,” the man said, “knowing those things exist.”

“Sweetie, it’s better if you don’t think about it.”

A few minutes after midnight, a man in a flannel bathrobe walked out of the Robarts Library to a car parked on the street with its engine running. He hesitated a moment, then opened the passenger door and climbed in.

“Good evening, sir,” said the old woman behind the wheel. Her name was Lorna.
Lorna the librarian
, the man in the bathrobe thought for no particular reason. He tried to grasp the thread of this thought, but it slipped through his mental fingers like smoke.

“Good evening,” he replied, fastening his seatbelt.

“I must apologize for the lacklustre transportation. It’s not much to look at, but it will get you where you want to go.”

“Where do I want to go?” the man in the bathrobe asked automatically.

“Why, home, dear,” Lorna said, and pulled away from the curb.

“Home,” said the man in the bathrobe. He didn’t know where that was exactly, but for some reason that didn’t bother him. Knowing wasn’t nearly as important as understanding. Knowing was highly overrated, but understanding . . . understanding was key.