The Burning Page

There was a noise in the distance, something less even and precise than the deep pulse of the clock. It was footsteps.

Panic seized her heart and twisted. She struggled again to get to her feet. Her head was still empty and buzzing with the after-effect of overstraining herself. She had to lean on the bookcase to pull herself upright, and even then it was a struggle.

That was either Alberich himself, in the flesh, or some trusted servant. She had to reach the centre of this maze before they caught up with her, or before Alberich could fill the Library with his presence again and crush her.

Irene shuffled between two bookcases, trying to keep her steps as quiet as possible. She didn’t look back at Zayanna. There wasn’t any time for affecting farewells to the dead or last promises of vengeance. I’m sorry, Zayanna, she thought. Would you have wanted this as an end to your story? Or would you rather have stayed alive? That’s the problem with getting too much into character . . .

With a wrench she pulled her mind away from morbid self-indulgence and back to the present situation. Her concentration and her sense of balance were coming back now that she was moving. She had got this far. Zayanna had died to get her this far. Irene was not going to let Alberich win now.

While she wasn’t tall enough, or situated high enough, to see the overall layout of the library between her and the central point, she could get an impression of it. Main roads of empty space radiated out from the centre like the spokes of a spider’s web, and smaller gaps between bookcases ran between them at irregular distances.

The footsteps behind her had stopped now. She thought she heard a voice speaking, very distantly and quietly, but not clearly enough for her to make out the words.

So what would I do if I was Alberich? I’d know that I was making for the centre. So I’d either get ahead of me – damn these pronouns – and wait to ambush me. Or I’d get up high where I could look down and spot me coming . . .

She stopped to look up at the bookcases around her. They were as tall as tower blocks – impossibly high for their size, structurally unsound, constructions that should have toppled over even before they were loaded with books. But nobody was standing on the top and looking down at her that she could see. Yet.

Irene wove a zigzag course towards the centre, taking side turns and avoiding taking a single open roadway between shelves. She tried to combine silence with as much speed as was humanly possible. Alberich might be able to enter the physical environment again shortly. At which point she would be a messy smear on the landscape.

She turned a corner, lurking in the shadow and looking to the left and right. No sign of Alberich. But something was wrong. Her instincts were screaming at her.

Wait. By the angle of the bookshelves, there shouldn’t be a shadow there. Which meant that the shadow was being cast by something irregular above her. Which meant . . .

‘Books, form a shield above me!’ she shouted, in the same breath that a voice from above called down, ‘Shelves, crush that woman!’

Books and shelves collided above her head. Irene ran for cover in a shower of wood and pages and dust, mentally cursing her opponent’s grasp of tactics. What could she do to stop him? She needed either to be up on the same level as him, or to find some way of hiding herself from him.

She looked up at the high bookshelves again. She did have an advantage. She was on the ground. Gravity was her advantage.

‘Ready to surrender yet, Ray?’ Alberich called down to her.

Irene pressed her back against her current shelter. The metal corners of an unfamiliar book ground into her shoulders, and she shifted sideways to ease it out from its place on the shelf. That would do. ‘Are you going to shout “Come out, come out, wherever you are”?’ she answered.

‘If you make this a children’s story, then I’ll make it a cautionary tale,’ he taunted. There was no sign of any movement in the surrounding shadows. She couldn’t get a bearing on where he was. But the shadow she’d seen above her had been cast by a real thing, and the voice talking to her now was a human voice. The earlier thing had sounded anything but . . . So Alberich was back in a human form again. Less dangerous in some ways, more in others. ‘Did you ever read your Struwwelpeter?’

The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman! ‘My parents never liked me reading horror stories.’ Irene edged sideways along, squinting up at the tops of the surrounding bookcases. The clock sounded louder now. She prayed that didn’t signify anything ominous for her Library. ‘So of course I read them anyhow.’

‘You sound like the disobedient type. I should have recruited you earlier.’ And there he was, just the edge of a curve of a shadow on the bookcase to her left, the equivalent of two storeys up. He’d gone down on all fours, making his shadow smaller, but now that she’d spotted him she could keep track of him. ‘The offer’s still open.’

Irene brought the book she was holding to her lips. ‘I still don’t understand what you want from me,’ she said, trying to make it sound like negotiation. ‘I’m not the only young Librarian out there. I’m certainly not the only one who’s ever been demoted. Convince me that you aren’t about to kill me the minute I step out of hiding.’

‘You’re the only one I can find who read that story in the Grimm book.’

‘It’s that important to you?’

‘It is. You see, Ray, I need to find my son.’

The words my son didn’t make sense at first. The story in the Grimm book had mentioned his sister’s child, not his child, and Irene’s first thought was that Alberich must have misread something. But then the concepts fell into place in her mind, and she tasted bile in her mouth. His son. His sister’s son. What he did to his own sister . . .