The Poison Eaters and Other Stories

Page 21

When Justin knocked on the door, he was met by a gentleman in a waistcoat. He had a slight paunch and long hair tied back in a ponytail.
"Excellent,” the man said. “Eager. I'm Sandlin."
"Justin,” said Justin. He hoped his palms weren't sweating.
"Each year I hire a new library student—you'll pick up where the last one left off. Dewey decimal. No Library of Congress, got it?"
"I understand perfectly,” Justin said.
Sandlin led Justin through a house shrouded in white sheeting, down a dusty staircase to a cavernous basement. Masses of bookshelves formed a maze beneath swaying chandeliers. Justin sucked in his breath.
"There's a desk somewhere that way,” Sandlin said. “A computer. Some books still in boxes. I used to run a bookshop, but I found that I wasn't suited for it. I didn't like when people bought things. I like to have all my books with me."
It was a vast, amazing collection. Justin could feel his pulse speed and a smile creep onto his face.
"Best to get started,” said Sandlin, turning and walking back up the stairs. “You have to leave before midnight. I have guests."
Justin couldn't imagine that there'd been many visitors entering through the front door, considering how thick the dust was upstairs. The wooden planks under his feet, however, were swept clean.
Sandlin stopped at the landing, gesturing grandly as he called down. “It is my belief that books are living things."
That sent a shiver up Justin's spine as he thought of Linda.
"And as living things, they need to be protected.” Sandlin walked the rest of the way up the stairs.
Justin rubbed his arms and bit back what he wanted to say. It was readers that needed to be protected, he thought. Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.
He'd considered this a lot at the bookstore, once Linda was gone and before he'd lost the job altogether. Grim-faced women would come in, dressed sensibly, pleading for a sequel like they were pleading for a lover's life. Children would sit on the rug and cry inconsolably over picture books where rabbits lost their mothers.
The desk—when he found it—was ordinary, gray metal rusted at the corners and the PC sitting on top was old enough that it had a floppy drive. The keyboard felt sticky under his fingers. Justin opened his backpack and looked in at Linda's book; when packing the night before, he found that he couldn't bring himself to leave it behind.
200—Religion
Justin had always opened new books with a sense of dread, but no dread could compare with opening Linda's book. Sometimes the militsiya were arresting a member of her new family, or she was swallowing priceless rubies so that she could smuggle them out of Russia. Occasionally she was in love. Or drinking strong tea out of a samovar. Or dancing.
He remembered her with ink-stained fingers and a messy apartment full of paperbacks. He'd lived there with her when they both worked in the bookstore. She was allergic to cats, but she couldn't resist petting the stray that the owner kept and her nose was always red from sneezing. She made spaghetti with olives when she was depressed.
He remembered the way they'd curled up together on the futon and read to one another. He remembered his laughing confession that he opened new books with a sense of dread akin to jumping off a cliff with a bungee on. He knew he probably wouldn't hit the rocks, but he was never really sure. Linda didn't understand. She read fearlessly, without care for how things turned out.
Things, she said, could always be changed.
She told him that she knew how to fold stuff up and put it in books. In the books, inside the stories themselves. She'd proven it to him. She put a single playing card into a paperback edition of Robin Hood. The Ace of Spades. Little John had found it. He'd become convinced it was a sign that they would be defeated by the Sheriff of Nottingham and hanged himself. The Merry Men were less merry after they found his body. Justin had looked at other editions of Robin Hood, but they were unchanged.
After that, he'd believed her. He'd wanted her to alter other books—like fix Macbeth so that no one died. She said that Macbeth was unlucky enough without her tampering.
They'd fought a lot in their third year together. Linda had heard that there was a man named Mr. Sandlin who could take things out of books as well as putting them in. She wanted them to give up the lease on their apartment and their jobs at the bookstore. She wanted them to enroll in library school. Early one morning, after fighting all night—a fight that had started out about moving and wound up about every hateful thing they'd ever thought about one another—she folded herself up and put herself into a fat Russian novel.
"Ohgodohgodohgod,” Justin had said. “Please. No. Please. Oh God. Please.” He'd opened the cover to see an illustration of her in pen and ink, sitting in a group of unsmiling characters.
After that, he couldn't tell her that he was sorry or that her bolshie-sympathizing uncle was going to expose her in the next chapter or that she was going to regret leaving him now that she was stuck in an ice storm with only a mink cloak and muff to protect her. He was just a reader and readers can't do anything to make the story stop—except close the book.
300—Social Sciences
The next time that Sandlin opened the door, he was dressed less impressively, in pajamas with blue stripes. He greeted Justin with a huge yawn.
"Am I early?” Justin asked, although he knew he wasn't.
Sandlin shook his head and waved Justin in. “Time I got up anyway."
"Right. I'll be downstairs,” said Justin as Sandlin dumped out the coffeepot and filled it with water from the tap.
The collection, which had looked so grand at first sight, was, on closer inspection, quite odd. None of the books seemed to be first editions. Many were not even hardcover. Tattered paperbacks nestled up against reprinted hardcover editions of classics with their spines cracked. Some books even appeared to be galleys from publishers, marked, “for review purposes only—not for resale."
Most of the books were easy to classify. They were almost all 800s, mostly 810s or 820s.
He glanced at the backs of their covers and the copyright pages and then typed their titles into the database. On the spines of each, he taped a label printed in marker.
After he finished a dozen, Justin decided that he should start shelving. He lifted the stack, inhaling book dust, and headed into the aisles.
The problem with everything being in the 800s is that the markers on the ends of the shelves blurred together. Justin took a few turns and then wasn't sure he knew where he was going or where he could find the places for the books in his arms.
"Sandlin?” he called, but although his voice echoed in the vast room, he doubted it was loud enough to carry all the way upstairs.
He turned again. A plastic drink stirrer rested on the floor. Bending to pick it up, he felt panic rise. Where was he? He'd thought he was retracing his steps.
By the time he found his way back to the desk, he felt a faintly ridiculous but almost overwhelming sense of relief.
Sarah leaned back in her seat and sat a roll of twine in front of him.
"I heard you got the Sandlin job,” Sarah said. “My friend used to work there, said it was like a maze. This is his Theseus trick."
” That's smart,” Justin said, thinking of Theseus picking his way through the Minotaur's lair, unwinding Ariadne's string behind him. Thinking of how his heart had pounded when he was lost in the stacks. It wasn't just smart, it was clever, even classical. He wished he'd thought of it.
"Rock, paper, scissors to see if I can come with you."
"No way,” Justin said. “I could lose my job."
"My friend said some other stuff—about what happens after midnight. Come on. If you win, I'll tell you everything I know. If I win, I get to come."
"Fine.” Justin scowled, but Sarah didn't seem cowed. She raised a brow studded with tiny silver bars.
Rock. Paper. Scissors. Her rock smashed his scissors.
"Best two out of three,” Justin said, but he knew he was already defeated.
"Tomorrow night,” said Sarah, with a smile that he couldn't interpret. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less he knew about why she'd started talking to him at all.
400—Language
That night, Justin tucked the string and Linda's book into his backpack and drove to Sandlin's house. He worked his way through cataloging an entire box of books, when, on impulse, he flipped a thin volume open.
The spine of the book read Pride and Prejudice so Justin was surprised to find Indiana Jones in the text. Apparently, he'd been sleeping his way through all the Jane Austen books and had seduced both Kitty and Lydia Bennett. Justin discovered this fact when Eleanor Tilney from Northanger Abbey showed up to confront Indy with his illegitimate child.
He looked at the page and read it twice just to be sure:
To Catherine and Lydia, neither Miss Tilney nor her claims were in any degree interesting. It was next to impossible that Miss Tilney had told the truth, and although it was now some weeks since they had received pleasure from the society of Mr. Jones, they had every confidence in him. As for their mother, she was weathering the blow with a degree of composure which astonished her husband and daughters.
He closed the book, set it back on the shelf, and opened another. Peter Pan. In it, Sherlock Holmes deduced that Tinkerbell had poisoned Wendy while Watson complained to the mermaids that no one understood his torrid romance with one of the shepherdesses from a poem. Wendy's ghost flitted around quoting lines from Macbeth. Peter wasn't in the book at all. He'd left to be a valet to Lord Rochester in a play of which no one had ever heard.
Justin shut Peter Pan so quickly that one of the pages cut a thin line in his index finger. He stuck his bleeding finger in his mouth and tasted ink and sweat. It made him feel vaguely nauseous.
500—Natural Sciences & Mathematics
Scrambling over to his backpack, Justin started unrolling the string. It dragged across the floors, through the aisles as he wound his way though the maze of shelves. At first, it was just books, but as he moved deeper into the stacks, he discovered a statue of a black-haired man in a long blue robe and eyes that glittered like they were set with glass, a velvet fainting couch, and a forgotten collection of champagne flutes containing the dregs of a greenish liquid beside a single jet button.