To Be Read

the library was the only room that mattered

Happy Friday the 13th, ghouls. Here’s a bonus story for you to mark this important date.

This post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help small publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme.

I don’t know how many participants will contribute fiction, but I just had to put my spin on this one. I hope you enjoy (and check out SmallStack!).

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Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

Adele set a bundle on Gavin’s end table— the heel of a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese that was nearing its last day, wrapped in a dishcloth.

Between fingernails as long and yellow as talons, Gavin pincered a single, whisper-thin page of the book he was reading. He did not lift his eyes, which were caged behind two unruly white eyebrows.

“Hello Gavin, dear. What are we reading today?”

Gavin angled the book on his lap ever so slightly, showing her the cover. But she wasn’t even looking. She took a deep breath and sighed it out.

“I just love the smell of this room, have I told you that?” She had told him dozens of times.

“Folks would say it’s falling down around you, and I suppose they would be right, but the smell of old books is—” she breathed in again.

Gavin, his eyes moving from the page for a moment, watched her chest swell.

“It’s Heaven.”

He grunted. He had no time for small talk today. He had only a few dozen pages left to read in the book that spread across his narrow lap.

Adele started to pick her way around the library, her head cocked horizontally, scanning the titles she’d scanned a hundred times before. Though he wouldn’t say it, Gavin quite liked when she puttered around his bookshelves, as long as she wasn’t talking. He wished sometimes that she would choose a book and read with him, but she wasn’t “much of a book person” as she told him.

He had read somewhere that there were one hundred and fifty million books in the world, and two million more published every day. He couldn’t fathom a life where not a single one interested him.

“Not much to say today, eh Gavin?” Adele leaned over, peering through her bifocals into Gavin’s faded brown eyes. “Busy busy, as usual. Well, that’s alright. I’ll come by to check on you in a couple days.”

She let herself out, the heavy wooden door sealing Gavin in with his books.

At ninety-one years, the great tragedy of Gavin Hewitt’s life wasn’t that he was alone and his neighbor kept him alive by bringing leftover food once every couple days.

No, the great and looming tragedy that hung over him was that life was too short to finish his reading. The human lifespan—not even his, which had been quite long— was not designed to properly march through a world with so many books. Tall and pale with a hacking cough, his spine bent into a perfect letter C, Gavin was racing to read them all. At least, all the ones he owned.

By the time the sun set, Adele was long gone and Gavin had started a new book. He estimated he was very close to the end of his collection, but it was only a guess. He did not have time to calculate how many pages he needed to read every day to have a whisper of a prayer of finishing before he breathed his last. He did not have time to calculate, only to read.

His strategy— a stooped shuffle around the stacks, pulling a book that looked dustier than the others— had finally begun to turn up more repeats than not. Gavin feared he was forgetting books he had already read, reading them again and again in a loop of elderly humiliation, but he couldn’t afford to stop and fear things. He had to maintain his pace.

While he read, the grand Hewitt mansion crumbled down around him. Previous Hewitts had stewarded the home through wars, depressions, but he would take it into the ground when he died.

What if he expired with three pages left to read, and he knew as his heart beat its last beat that he had once wasted ten minutes of precious reading time replacing a door hinge?

He had been quite lucky that the library seemed impervious to water and rot. Somehow, other than a coating of white dust, it was still beautiful.

Cobwebs in the corners and bats darting through hallways at dusk were the least of his problems. In fact, he had read somewhere that bats ate bookworms. And bookworms— he had read somewhere that they weren’t worms at all but the hungry larvae of various insects— were a much more devious threat.

What if he got halfway through a book only to find boreholes through the pages? Words, whole sentences digesting in the belly of some louse. What then? No, the bats could stay.

Late that night, Gavin curled his spine nearly into a spiral with Proust’s massive In Search of Lost Time settled heavy in his lap. He was anxious about this volume, a truly ambitious read on which he would need to focus all his energy. But he felt if he could finish this book, by far the longest remaining in his collection, the rest would fly by in an instant.

In the silence of the library, he enjoyed the sound of each thin page being turned. A comforting swish as he slid his fingers along the edge of the paper, each one bringing him closer to his goal.

Soon, however, he became aware of a soft clicking sound.

It was coming from the walls and as he listened it seemed to grow louder and more insistent.

Deathwatch beetles, he surmised. He had read somewhere that you could hear them on quiet summer nights. They ate wood, not paper, so they were no threat to him. They could have the walls.

Of course, associating them with death was ancient superstition. The beetles were simply clicking against the wood to try to find mates. It had nothing to do with death— quite the opposite, really.

But after a few more pages, he felt an unusual gurgle in his chest. He coughed, but it didn’t subside. His heart beat hard, so hard he felt it pound—once, twice— against his chest wall. His vision began to tunnel.

Gavin had dreamed of a dying moment fit for a novel. He wanted to close a book and gaze at his completed collection, then shut his eyelids and meet his final rest in peaceful satisfaction. But, like many people who aren’t in stories, he simply ran out of gas, reaching a spidery hand out into thin air for no one, wishing it wasn’t so soon. The massive tome in his lap had barely been started.

Next to him, the light in his lamp burned for one more day before it died, too.

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When Adam Hewitt learned his great uncle had died and he had inherited a grand family estate, like something out of a Tim Burton movie, he was delighted.

“A secret uncle who croaks and leaves you everything? I agree dude, it’s a dream come true.” The person accepting Adam’s resignation from Uber laughed over the phone, incredulous. “But you don’t have to like, quit this job. You can just stop doing it.”

Adam knew he didn’t have to resign from Uber, but he desperately needed an audience to share his good fortune. Inheriting wealth from a rich, dead, unknown relative was the ultimate jackpot.

Upon reaching the estate, his fantasy of riches wavered in the dusty air. Even from the long driveway, he could see the mansion was a colossal wreck. Drooping under its own weight, situated on endless acres of lawn-turned-swamp, the brick house had a hole high on its front wall the size of a wrecking ball. The front door was ajar, its heavy brass knocker hanging from one screw.

Sitting in his car, he thought about all the nights he had laid awake, his stomach twisting, worried about how he would pay his bills, literally praying for a rich dead relative.

Maybe the rest of the house was fine. It was his only chance.

Standing in the foyer, Adam squinted back up at the hole. A family of birds was disturbed by his presence and flew out, dropping white feathers to join their splashes of shit on the filthy rug. The lush carpets, oil paintings, and antique furniture in the foyer were all ruined, fuzzed with black mold, cracked and splintered, rotting in place.

Maybe the bones are still good, he thought, parroting a phrase he had heard on reality home makeover shows. Which part is the bones?

He slowly made his way through the debris left by his mystery relative— a slumped grand piano, a blackened fireplace full of bricks, a white vase smashed almost to powder. He didn’t dare make his way up the grand staircase, which looked heavy and soft, like it might collapse and pull the entire roof down on it. Finally, he came to the library and pushed the door open.

Free of obvious vermin, the library had high ceilings that looked watertight, deep, plush carpets without stains, and even one of those ladders on wheels like in the movies. Adam was stunned. He wasn’t the literary type, but even he was struck by the library’s beauty, its promise of wisdom, history, and meaning.

Through two-story leaded windows sunlight poured in, setting the hundreds— maybe thousands— of feet of shelf space aglow. The shelves were crammed with row upon row of stately leather-bound books. Weedy stalks of books sprouted in every corner. Tipping pyramids of books blocked the shelves. Stacks of fraying, sun-worn books by three, by five, by twenty perched in the bright windowsills.

At the center of the room, under an arched floor lamp, stood an oxblood red, leather wingback chair, its legs carved talons gripping wooden balls. The leather was cracked in a way that mapped the contours of a body, the seat and headrest were worn black from use.

Adam sat, aware this was where his Uncle — Kevin’s— corpse was found. The cushion smelled only a little of decay, and he didn’t even mind it, compared to the moldy horrors he had passed through. The backs of his thighs slotted elegantly into the deep grooves left behind. I guess Uncle Kevin was about the same size as me, he thought, comforted by the idea.

The pace of the world he had come from suddenly seemed entirely wrong. Rushing around for nothing, flicking past 20-second videos at a stoplight while the Uber app added impatient passengers to his queue.

This, this was the right way to spend one’s days: in a serious room, pondering and contemplating, learning all there was to learn. He felt like he should go back and tell everyone he knew. They were wasting their lives out there!

Adam reached across the arm of the chair and hefted a huge black book into his lap, imagining this was how the old man had done it. He felt like a kid, play acting a character in a storybook, and he had to remind himself this all was his. The book felt warm, like a cat curled up on his lap.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Adam thought he had heard of Proust.

He opened the cover and read the first lines. They were interesting. Adam hadn’t read more than one page of a book since high school, but here was his chance to change. He was a rich man now, maybe. He could afford to slow down. He could enjoy something meant for rich men.

He settled himself into the chair, which felt like the most comfortable seat in all of Heaven and Earth. He read a few pages, or perhaps more than a few, because when he next looked up, the light from the windows was the color of wine.

He tugged the chain on the lamp, but the bulb was burned out.

“I guess reading time is over, Uncle Avon,” he said to the book in his lap. “Time to find a bed.” He set the book down in the chair.

As he neared the library’s great heavy door, he started thinking about what was out there. It was a cavernous house, and he had barely even explored it. The bedrooms could be rain soaked, the floors could collapse under him. The roof could be caved in, the electricity shot. There could be armies of rats picking through the refuse of Uncle Van’s life.

There could be people, murderous squatters hiding in rooms he hadn’t ventured into.

Opening the door, Adam faced a dark, echoing passage, where his cell phone light was swallowed mere inches in front of him. It smelled damp and sour. He brushed his palm along the wall but couldn’t locate a light switch. He didn’t even know which direction to go.

He heard a low groan— the house settling, right? That’s what they always say. Old houses, right?— and a creeping cold breeze brushed his ankles. He backed away and allowed the door to swing shut. It slammed with a boom that left his pulse racing. In a near panic, he dragged an end table stacked high with books in front of the door, blocking it. The books slid across the table and onto the floor and Adam scooped them up, his forehead glistening with the effort.

The smell of the old books puffed up around him. Such a strange smell, earthy and calm. It soothed his nerves.

This room is perfect, clean and safe, as long as you’re not afraid of dust bunnies, he thought. Looks like I’m sleeping in your chair tonight, Uncle Evan.

His eyes adjusted to the soft, silvery moonlight coming through the windows. He made his way back to the chair.

Just need a couple light bulbs and this will be fine. There’s plenty in here to keep me busy while I figure out the rest of the house. I could probably even put a futon in here.

He settled Proust in his lap, heavy and warm like a blanket. Then he folded his hands and closed his eyes, as snug in the leather chair as he had ever been in his life.

Shuffling along the foggy border between wake and sleep, a thought he had never thought before drifted into his consciousness. It was a thought he barely recognized as his own, and he felt rather proud of the man he was becoming.

Read them, Adam. Read them all.

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To see more posts from this Seed Pod, visit the thread here.