Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

I start by tracing the chamber’s perimeter, trailing my fingers along the shelves, feeling the bumps of the spines as I go. My other arm is outstretched and sensing, like a mouse’s whisker.

I hope there aren’t mice in here.

There. My headlamp catches a table edge, and then I see a heavy black chain and the book that it binds. The cover bears tall silver letters that reflect brightly back at me: MANVTIVS.

From my messenger bag, I produce first my laptop and then the dismantled skeleton of the GrumbleGear. The assembly process is more difficult in the darkness, and I fumble with the slots and tabs for too long, afraid I’ll break the cardboard. The cameras come out of my bag next, and I give one of them a test snap. The flash explodes and lights up the whole chamber for a bright microsecond and immediately I regret it, because my vision is ruined, swimming with wide purple spots. I blink and wait and wonder about the mice and/or bats and/or minotaur.

MANVTIVS is truly gigantic. Even if it wasn’t chained to the table, I don’t know how somebody would get one of these books out of here. I have to wrap both arms around it in an awkward embrace to haul it up onto the scanner. I’m afraid the cardboard won’t bear the load, but physics is on my side tonight. Grumble’s design holds strong.

So I start scanning. Flip, flash, snap. The book is just like all the rest I’ve seen in the Waybacklist: a dense matrix of coded characters. Flip, flash, snap. The second page is the same as the first, and so is the third, and the seventh. I fall into a trance, turning the wide monotonous pages and taking their measure. Flip, flash, snap. The grim letters of MANVTIVS are all that exist in the universe; in between camera flashes, I see only flat buzzing darkness. I feel with my fingers to find the next page.

There’s a shake. Is someone down here? Something just made the table shake.

It shakes again. I try to say Who’s there? but it catches in my throat, which is parched, and I make a little croak instead.

Another shake. Then, before I have time to formulate a terrifying theory about the Horned Guardian of the Reading Room—obviously Edgar Deckle’s werebeast form—there’s more shaking, and the cave rumbles and roars and I have to clutch the scanner to keep it upright. In a flood of relief, I realize it’s the subway, just the subway, cruising through bedrock next door. The noise echoes back into itself and becomes a low bellow in the darkness of the cave. Finally, it passes, and I start scanning again.

Flip, flash, snap.

Many minutes pass, or maybe more than minutes, and bleakness washes over me. Maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t have any dinner, so my blood sugar is bottoming out, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m standing alone in a freezing pitch-black subterranean vault. But whatever the cause, the effect is real: I feel keenly the stupidity of this entire enterprise, this absurd cult. Book of life? This is barely a book at all. The Dragon-Song Chronicles: Volume III is a better book than this.

Flip, flash, snap.

But of course: I can’t read it. Would I say the same thing about a book in Chinese or Korean or Hebrew? The big Torahs in Jewish temples look like this, right? Flip, flash, snap—heavy grids of inscrutable symbols. Maybe it’s my own limitation that’s getting to me. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t understand what I’m scanning. Flip, flash, snap. What if I could read this? What if I could glance across the page and, you know, get the joke? Or gasp at the cliff-hanger?

Flip, flash, snap.

No. Turning the pages of this encoded codex, I realize that the books I love most are like open cities, with all sorts of ways to wander in. This thing is a fortress with no front gate. You’re meant to scale the walls, stone by stone.

I’m cold and tired and hungry. I have no idea how much time has passed. It feels like maybe my entire life has been spent in this chamber, with the occasional dream of a sunny street. Flip flash snap, flip flash snap, flip flash snap. My hands are cold claws, curled and cramped as if I’ve been playing video games all day.

Flip, flash, snap. This is a terrible video game.

*   *   *

At last, I’m done.

I lace my fingers together and bend them backward, pressing them out into space. I jump up and down, trying to restore my bones and muscles to some semblance of normal hominid configuration. It doesn’t work. My knees hurt. My back is cramped. There are jets of pain shooting out of my thumbs, up into my wrists. I hope it isn’t permanent.

I shake my head. I’m feeling really dismal. I should have brought a granola bar. Suddenly I am sure that starving to death in a pitch-black cave is the very worst way to die. That makes me think of the codex vitae lining the walls, and suddenly I get the creeps. How many dead souls are sitting—waiting—on the shelves all around me?

One soul matters more than the rest. It’s time to accomplish this mission’s second objective.