The Bookbinder and the Thief
Part One: The LibraryA squeaky wheel made Silas flinch and pause; his jaw clenched and his eyes shot to the offending castor. He stood motionless before the towering bookshelf, hands gripping the ancient oaken ladder, alert to any sounds of motion. The creak had been almost imperceptible, but to his anxious ears it echoed for eternity in the darkened stacks. He waited until the pounding of his heartbeat overwhelmed the still resonating cry of antique wood on wood before he resumed his snails-pace search; pulling the immense rolling ladder along behind him. Silas knew that someone, somewhere, in this immense library was awake. They had to be. Destiny wasn’t going to write itself.
He wondered how long he’d been here creeping through the corridors and halls; trying desperately not to be discovered. He’d eaten a decently sized supper before he’d begun his quest and despite his nerves he was growing hungry again; far, far too long, then. Surely it was nearing morning.
Silas had known that the Library was big, but he never imagined anything like this. It was a veritable city unto itself with ornate vaulted ceilings four or five stories high and shelves of time-worn books reaching skyward such that from the top of a stack a man could touch the star-laden heavens depicted in tile mosaic above. Rows and rows and rows of them, stretching as far as the eye could see in any direction. Silas half expected to round a corner and be confronted with the skeletal visage of a long forgotten monk, lost for eternity among the lives and fates surrounding him.
Indeed, it had taken some time for Silas to decipher the sorting method of the books. He recalled with a shudder, as though dashed by a chill wind, his brief time spent among the tomes of the dead. The aisles blanketed with the dust of ages. Worm eaten pages littering the floor. Events and memories long forgotten by the world; irrelevant and without worth. He considered the people written on those pages. Surely their lives felt important at the time. Surely they’d had friends, family, lovers and dreams… But none of that mattered now.
Silas had been taught growing up that everyone was special, everyone was important in their own way.
Like a stone dropped in water, his father had told him,
our actions ripple outward to influence the larger world. Even if we don’t see it. But those abandoned corridors showed him, without a shadow of doubt, that eventually all waves crash upon the shore. It was a hard lesson to accept. He tried not to think about it. About the eventual, inevitable, futility of his task. Instead he counted stacks until finally reaching his destination.
Silas planted the locking mechanism on the ladder and began climbing with spiderlike ease, the soft soles of his shoes gripping each wrung, guiding him toward the heavens in deft silence. He looked down but once and found that the floor had disappeared in the darkness. The thought of such distance prevented his eyes from wandering a second time. He watched barely discernible names and dates cycle past as he climbed until finally he stopped, wrapped one leg about the ladder to secure himself and free his hands, and withdrew a book. The volume was no different than those surrounding it but for its size; thicker than some, thinner than others. It was bound in simple brown cowhide, the cover was smooth and without blemish or ornamentation. He ran his fingers across its face with a delicate, almost reverent, touch before cracking it open.
Reaching into his pocket Silas extracted a small bottle half filled with a semi-viscous liquid. He gave it one quick, violent shake and the chemical mixture began to glow dimly. He placed one end of the bottle in his teeth, holding it in place, bathing the page in its subtle cyan light.
Silas read, silently, lips moving around the bottle as he did, mouthing the words to himself; events he’d already seen, days past. He flipped further back in the book, scanning the pages quickly with his index finger. He turned further back still, scanning and flipping and scanning and flipping further and further into the future until finally shutting the book in frustration.
“Damn it!” an inadvertent whisper escaped his lips. Slurred and distorted around the bottle still grasped in his teeth. Silas quickly stowed the bottle back in his pocket and leaned in against the ladder flattening his silhouette as best he could against the shelf. Again he listened. Listened for the groan of an old chair being moved, the cough of aging lungs, the shuffling of feet, or voices in the darkness. The blood pumped in his ears and he felt the sudden urge to urinate.
Silas closed his eyes, consciously calming his breathing, long breath in, long breath out slowing his racing heart and waited until he was sure no one was coming before making his way back down the ladder; this time forcing himself to look down lest someone emerge from the darkness, waiting for him at the bottom.
The coast was clear when he reached the floor, book hugged close his body. He’d been so concentrated on not being caught he hadn’t noticed he’ brought it down. Silas looked at the leather-bound tome in his hands, then looked back up the ladder. His mind wandered back to those forgotten volumes, dissolute and decaying. Pointless and forgotten. A darkness entered his thoughts and brought with it an idea.
Slipping the book into his satchel, Silas crept back the way he’d come, a new haste in his steps. He dragged the ladder behind him caring little for squeaky wheels or rumbling castors. He stopped a few stacks down and lunged up the ladder, climbing recklessly, putting more emphasis on speed than stealth. He stopped, still in view of the floor and drew the light from his pocket. Scanning the spines quickly he pulled free his own name and hopped down from the ladder with an audible thud. He didn’t bother to open the tome, instead placing it in his satchel with the other.
In the distance he heard the noises he was expecting. Voices, calm and mumbling heading in his direction. The feet didn’t shuffle but marched hurriedly. Somewhere, muffled and distant, a bell tolled.
Silas ran. The Library was huge, but they still had to find him; he knew where he was going. He retraced his steps, noting the grease pen marks he’d made on the stacks to guide him home. Skipping the volumes of the dead he raced for the window from whence he’d entered. He could see it in the distance, the light of sunrise just beginning to creep over the sill. He could see the rope.
There were many voices now, both behind and in front of him. Words he didn’t understand punctuated with a series of distinct whistles. Silas looked over his shoulder as he ran, checking for pursuit. Nothing. He turned again toward his destination and almost collided with a monstrous figure emerging from an adjacent aisle. Silas spun and lost his footing, tumbling into a controlled landing at the base of his escape rope. He looked up at a hulking mass of woolen cloth and flesh.
Nearly eight feet tall it loomed over him, gaunt and haggard the moldy brown robes hung off of its frame. A hood obscuring a pointed, inhuman face with a long, ragged beard sat upon it’s knobby shoulders. Its eyes were empty sockets and its teeth rotted into vicious, jagged points.
Silas could only stare, frozen in place by terror. He had expected harmless old men. Mousey creatures that spent their day scribbling away in dusty old books. But the creature before him, somewhere between man and beast, was anything but harmless. It reached out to him with long ancient fingers; arthritic knuckles and twisted nails loomed in his vision.
Some still active instinct swatted the claw aside and Silas was back in action, leaping to his feet and climbing the rope feverishly. The monk reached for him again and Silas kicked at it as more rounded the corner. He kept climbing, out of the monster’s reach.
A heavy wooden cudgel bounced off the wall next his head, denting and splintering the immaculately polished paneling. A second hit off to his right. Two more, one on either side. Still he climbed, nearly to the window ledge. He could smell the fresh mountain air; he could hear birdsong outside.
Finally, one of the projectiles connected and he heard a crack. Silas only barely held his grip on the rope, as a pain like fire ripped its way through his side and into his shoulder. Broken rib, almost certainly. Adrenaline pushed his free hand to the window sill as screeches of rage erupted beneath him. He pulled himself over the ledge and, with his injured right arm tucked against his body, shimmied down the rope outside.
Part Two: The Thief“Carol? Carol, are you here?” Silas shoved his way past the heavy wooden door. He winced as his injured body brushed against the door frame. He wasn’t used to using his left hand for everything, but with his right arm immobilized by the barber’s tight wrappings he didn’t have a lot of choice. He crossed the room and set his satchel down on the workbench that served as the bookbinders service counter. “Carol!”
A tall heavy-set man appeared from a back room, he carried a wooden mallet in one hand and there was resin on his beard. It was clear he’d been a powerful man once, muscular and proud, but his present countenance was that of a man defeated. He straightened his spectacles and squinted, “How can I help… Oh, Silas, it’s you.” His voice was deep and resonant, a lingering artifact of the man he’d once been, “What happened to you, Boy.”
Silas gritted his teeth as he pulled up a stool, “Broken ribs.” He seated himself gingerly before the workbench, “At least two, Harris says.” He took a deep shuddering breath.
“How did that happen?” Carol asked, dubiously. He’d known Silas since he was a boy, having served with his father in the King’s Legion. He’d been Uncle Carol into Silas’ teens when the war took his father. The kid’s mother hadn’t lasted much longer, succumbing the despair and disease. Carol offered to take him in, to shelter him, that had only lasted a few months. The two headstrong men and failed to see eye to eye and a short time later Silas had set out on his own, a young man of fourteen years.
Carol never asked how Silas had made ends meet during those years living on the streets, but he had his suspicions. This wasn’t the first time the boy had come to him, battered and bruised, in need of money or food.
Silas waved the question away, making a pained face as he did so, “Not important.” He said, holding his side. “Look in the bag.”
Carol set the mallet aside an undid the clasp on the satchel withdrawing a simple, leather-bound tome. He examined the cover. Though lacking decoration or ornament, the craftsmanship was impeccable. The leather was obviously old, the edges of the vellum pages yellowed with age, but the binding appeared nearly new; secure and taut. Carol had been binding and repairing books for decades but had never seen anything approaching such quality. He examined the spine to find Silas’ name branded into the leather.
“What is this?” Carol asked.
“It’s my book.” Silas answered.
“I can see that, Boy,” he’d never liked it when the kid was glib, “Where did you get it?”
“No. Look.” Silas cracked the pages so the old man could see the writing contained therein, “It’s
my book. It’s me. It’s
me.”
Carol’s eyes widened. He was looking at a passage detailing a time before Silas’ father had passed. An argument he’d had with his mother, his father consoling him, teaching him. Carol felt the pangs of long buried memories rising at the mention of his old friend. He snapped the volume shut with his meaty paws.
“You stole this.” Carol said, pointedly. “You stole this from the Library.”
Silas looked proud of himself.
“Idiot boy. You could have been killed.” He pulled a second book from the satchel, “What’s this then?”
“That’s what I came here about,” the thief started, “I wanted to ask you about—“
“Jocelyn Freeland?” Carol asked absently. “The tailor’s girl?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you have her book?” it was less a question than a command for an answer. “Nevermind,” he said hastily, “Whatever this is, I want nothing to do with it.” That was a lie. The more Carol examined the tome; feeling the stitching and cuts with his fingertips, the more he wanted to take it apart. To study it. How it was sewn, what kind of adhesives were used, the ink, the vellum… He wanted to understand every nuance of its creation. He wanted to emulate it.
Silas watched the bookbinder, turning the book over and over in his hands, almost involuntarily, “No. Uncle Carol, listen.”
“Uncle Carol, now?” the big man asked, bemused. The books’ spell over him had been broken. “This must be big. Go ahead, ask me so I can refuse and you can return these books and this can be over.”
“Remember how I’ve been telling you that I’ve been courting Jocelyn.” Silas began, there was a sheepish quality to his tone.
“I do,” Carol confirmed, “Been about a year now, right?”
“Yes, well… I might have exaggerated that a little.”
Carol grunted; half amused, half encouraging the boy to elaborate.
“I tried courting her, for a long time. I introduced myself, I brought her gifts, flowers… I… I even got a job, working for her father at his estate.”
Carol was a little surprised about that. He knew Silas to be driven, almost insatiable, when it came to getting what he wanted, but he never expected him to go so far as to seek out honest employment.
“But look,” Silas continued, snatching Jocelyn’s book from Carol’s hands, “I’m not even in here. Anywhere. Not by name anyway. Look.” Silas began flipping through the book, “’The man,’ it says. ‘The gardener,’ ‘peasant,’ ‘rogue…’ She doesn’t even know who I am.”
Carol flipped through the book, stopping occasionally to rea a passage or two, “Who’s Derick”
“Her future husband, I think,” Silas said with a sigh, he let his head fall into his one good hand, “I don’t know, I didn’t read all of it.”
“Do you know any Derick’s?” Carol asked.
“No.”
“Nor do I. Not a local, then.”
“Yeah.” Silas confirmed.
Carol shut the book, placing one massive hand beneath Silas’s chin and raising the boy’s head to meet his eyes, “So what do you want from me?”
Silas sat up, cleared his throat and gathered his confidence, “I want you to merge the books.”
“No.”
Silas crumbled. His shoulders slumped, his one free arm hung limp, his chin dropped to his chest. He very much gave the appearance of having just been punched in the stomach. He only needed to fall backward from his stool to complete the charade. “Why?”
“Why?” Carol was incredulous, “Just think about what you’re asking. She already has a future, here,” he raised the book, shaking in front of Silas’s face, “it’s already written and you’re not a part of it.”
“Then we change it.” Silas pleaded.
“Have you read your own book?” Carol asked.
“No. I tried, the words don’t make any sense.”
“Maybe your future is better without her. Did you ever think of that?”
“How? What are my prospects? Look at me.” Silas gestured to his current state of affairs.
“What about this Derick fellow?” Carol challenged.
“Who cares? I don’t know him, you don’t know him,” He was off the stool pacing, “And she’ll never know him. No one gets hurt.”
“I’d be stealing her whole future.”
“She’ll never know!” Silas yelled. “I
love her, Uncle Carol.”
Carol noted a strange tone coming over the boy. Something between sorrow and a more existential despair.
“Besides,” Silas continued, voice lowered, “It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“What does that mean?” Carol asked. “Stop your pacing, Boy, and look at me.”
Silas stopped and turned.
“What does that mean?” Carol’s tone was deep and dangerous.
Silas stood unmoving. He squinted hard as though arranging thought in his head. He ran his free hand through his sweaty, brown hair and took a deep breath. Finally, he spoke, “In the Library… When I was in the Library I saw something.”
Carol stopped him with a raised hand, “Hold on, sit down. Let me get us something to drink.” Silas took a seat as Carol produced a pair of steins from a backroom and a bottle filled with an oily amber liquid. The old man pulled out the stopper and the fragrance of alcohol filled the room.
“What is that?” Silas asked, blinking back fume-induced tears.
“Used to drink it back in the war. Doesn’t have a name I don’t think.” He poured a couple of fingers into each stein, “Your father loved this stuff.” Carol took a sip, “Doesn’t age well, but it’s no worse than it was then.”
Silas took a sip, swallowed and coughed violently. Whatever this concoction was, he coated the interior of his mouth with a burning sensation. He could feel it’s spicy warmth creeping its way from his throat to his stomach. He grimaced, “That’s awful.”
“Yup.” The old soldier took another drink, “Continue.”
“In the library,” his vice was hoarse, “There’s this section. It’s full of dead people.”
“That makes sense,” Carol said, unfazed.
“But it’s completely different from the rest of the Library. The books are old, and broken. They’re falling apart and pages litter the floor like leaves inches deep.” Silas took another drink, coughed, “I could see bugs and worms eating them… All these people, their lives, just lying there mixed and decaying and rotting.
“Everything else in the Library is spotless, immaculate. But there, it was like no one ever went there. It was just this forgotten place where irrelevant things go to die. But that’s the worst part, Uncle. I looked at some of the books, the ones on the shelves. They weren’t all dead people. I saw names I knew, names from our town. People who, in the big picture, just don’t even matter; who’ve never mattered, who are
never going to matter.
“Everyone ends up there, Uncle. Eventually.” Silas said. “It doesn’t matter what we do. Eventually it stops mattering. We live, we die, our names are remembered for a time, maybe the things we did. Then those people, the ones who remember, they die too. Maybe they told your story, maybe you did something that someone cares about… But those people, too, they die. And with each subsequent generation, your memory and your deeds become less and less important until they’re gone.
“There is no legacy. No impact. People forget, people stop caring, our books rot and are eaten by worms.”
Carol sat in silence, digesting Silas’s revelation. It took a moment for him to decipher that logic taking place in the boy mind, “So who cares if we make some revisions?”
“Exactly.” Silas said. It wasn’t triumph. There was no satisfaction in having made his point, in having gotten through to the old man. His voice was utter defeat. “Who cares?”
Carol downed the remaining contents of his mug in one gulp, breaking the tension with exaggerated volume, “Welp, Boy, leave these with me,” he indicated the satchel and tomes, “let me think about it.” Carol came around to Silas’s side of the bench and began to guide him toward the door.
“So, will you do it?” Silas asked, looking over his shoulder at the books still lying on the bench.
“I don’t know,” Carol said, “Give me a few days.”
“Okay. Ow, alright, Uncle,” Silas broke away from the man’s not-so-subtle hint, “You don’t have to push. I’m going.”
Part Three: The Book BinderSleep didn’t come easy that night for Carol. After Silas had left the old man had spent a little more time with the bottle and crawled into bed before his better judgement had completely succumbed to drunkenness.
There was an obvious drive to Silas’s desperation; the boy wasn’t stupid. Despite being unable to read his own book, there was no denying how much thicker Jocelyn’s book was in comparison to his own. The thought kept Carol up. Such a simple discrepancy raising so many questions.
Was Silas destined to die young? Or was his life simply set to be long but uneventful? Maybe it meant nothing at all. Perhaps the two books were simply scribed by a different hand and one wrote larger than the other. None of those were questions Carol intended to tackle in the middle of the night; and so he slept fitfully until the sun, peeking through his bedroom window, roused him.
The books were right where he’d left them; side by side on the back room workbench.
Carol made himself a modest meal of bread and eggs, a few strips of salted pork and a stein of mead and sat down at the bench. He took a bite from the bread and cracked the cover on Silas’s tome. Carol ate and read, reliving memories from Silas’s point of view. There were heartwarming stories, mischievous misdeeds, and uncomfortable truths. Carol found himself skipping past whole sections detailing his old friend’s turbulent marriage; the things Silas had seen as a child.
He read as far as the previous night, taking special care in reading passages detailing The Library; corroborating Silas’s tale. He stopped there, at the night prior, considering whether or not he wanted to read on. He glanced down at the volumes profile on the table noting how far through the book he was; how deep into the boy’s life he’d already read.
He was over three quarters of the way through the entire text. Silas was a mere 19 years old and couldn’t be much more than a year or two from death. Carol swore under his breath and turned to the last page.
He read in horror about a mugging gone wrong. Silas, the closest thing the bookbinder had ever had to a son, stabbed and bleeding out in a gutter. Cold and alone. A failed thief. The constable never bothered to identify him. He was buried in a mass grave with other convicts and vagrants.
He snapped the book shut with a force that rattled the bench. The kid was a pain, to be sure, but that’s no way for a man to die. His decision made Carol took up his tool kit and went to work disassembling the volume; delicately cutting away the cover, carefully heating the resin adhesive to make the vellum signatures easier to separate. He placed the page sections in a neat stack, careful not to disturb their order.
Once he’d finished tearing down Silas’s book he set to work on the book of Jocelyn Freeland, pulling the sections apart, cutting loose pages or sometimes whole chapters detailing her life with Derick. She and Derick would never have children of her own, he noted, they would adopt. That much was comforting to Carol; knowing that his efforts wouldn’t invalidate an entire person. Where he cut away Dericks sections he replaced them with pages, from Silas’s book and in the boys book he included pages from hers.
Carol was amazed to see the narratives self-correct before his eyes; the ink crawling and reshaping itself before his eyes to form a coherent series of events out of two stories. The two books matched, they entangled, telling the same story from different perspectives. He hadn’t really considered the narrative aspect of his actions, only the mechanical. He continued working, relieved knowing that fate was re-writing itself as he did so.
The bookbinder labored all day and into the night sewing and gluing, cutting and shaping. Not thinking too much about the story other than to ensure that Silas’s final pages weren’t inserted until near the end of the completed text; until decades of time had passed for the both of them. The end result was two completely new volumes; neither of which fit their original covers.
Carol set the texts aside as the ink wandered to and fro upon the pages. He selected swatches of leather from his stores which most closely matched the simple cowhide of the originals and set to creating new covers, gluing them into place, branding the spines and placing each into a press to set up overnight.
He’d expected sleep to come easy that night, but instead his dreams were plagued with visions of The Library. The boy hadn’t told him about the monks, the vicious beasts with hollowed out eyes that wandered the stacks. He’ only learned about them from the book. Carol tossed and turned all night until, when morning came, he awoke frantic and cold with sweat. Something was wrong, he knew it to be true. The dreams were a warning.
Carol raced, half-dressed, to the book-block and released the press; pulling free Silas’s revised life. The book binder cracked the spine and read. He saw Silas and Jocelyn finally meet, saw her finally recognize him. He saw their marriage; he saw Silas working for her father as an apprentice tailor instead of a gardener. He saw Silas take over the business when her father passed. He saw the stress of business ownership and wealth weigh on the boy. He saw him take it out on his wife, the way Silas’s own father had dealt with such things. Carol continued reading, hoping, praying that things would turn around, things would get better; but Silas continued to descend into stress, frustration, rage and finally madness.
One bright sunny day in summer, a mere twenty years from the present, Silas would strike Jocelyn and she would fall down the stairs of their inherited manor house. She would not rise. His grief at his actions would consume him. Silas would not attend Jocelyn’s funeral, instead choosing to stay locked up in his study where he would put a musket in his mouth and take his own life.
Carol closed the book, tears in his eyes. “No…” he whimpered audibly, “What have I done?” he mourned for Silas but couldn’t muster sympathy. Silas, it appeared, was doomed to a life of hardship and an early end; perhaps meeting that end in a gutter is the more merciful course. Instead he cursed himself over the fate of the girl. Jocelyn, the woman Silas claimed to love would have lived well into old age and passed with her loving husband and adopted children and grandchildren at her bedside.
He had killed this girl. That much was irrefutable. He had stolen her happy life and replaced it with something vile and hurtful and that thing would bring her to a premature end.
He could still fix this.
Carol set the books side by side, flipping through the pages trying to determine which came from which original book. He examined them closely, checking the margins, the page numbers, the grain of the vellum itself trying to tell one from the other. The task was futile. While not identical, they were too similar to know for sure. Re-arranging them now might only make things worse.
The old man sat, head in his hands. Thoughts and emotions colliding, shaping and reshaping in his mind. Why had he even tried this? Who did he think he was toying with fate? Doesn’t matter? Of course it matters! It all matters!
His eyes wandered to the stack of pages he’d removed. The Derick stack. “I can fix this.” He took the pages up in a fist, shoving them indelicately into the satchel. He took up the books, placing them inside as well. He thought back on the story of the Library. More specifically, how to get there.
Carol shouldered the satchel, took up a walking stick and set off, leaving the door wide open behind him.
Epilogue“There.” Carol said, satisfied. “Finished.” He peered down at the desk before him. Two immaculately constructed volumes, the book of Silas and the book of Jocelyn Freeland, set side by side on and ornate workbench.
It had taken him weeks to sort it out, but under the tutelage of the monks he’d learned to decipher which pages belong where. He been able to reinstate the Derick pages, and set Silas’s grim destiny right. It was an easier decision to make than he’d expected and not once in those weeks of labor did he balk in his task knowing the sentence the boy would face.
Carol looked up from his tool kit to the massive hulk of robes and skin towering above him. “Well?”
The creature gazed back at him with its empty sockets and examined the covers with one long-clawed finger. It did not speak for gestured for Carol to rise and follow.
He scooped up the books and acquiesced; tailing four steps behind the ragged behemoth. Walking softly down a long corridor, passing workbenches and desks where other men, like himself, worked tirelessly writing and binding the innumerable volumes. The pair of them turned down one of the aisles approaching a shelf. The monk held out one knobby hand beckoning him. Carol reached under his arm and placed Jocelyn’s re-revised fate into its hand.
The creature looked from the book to the heavens above, and the volume lifted, as though weightless, floating upward until eventually locating its place among the rest of humanity. Carol smiled and made his way down the aisle to where he knew Silas’s book belonged; the sorting method had been one of the first things he learned when he arrived.
He spotted the gap on the shelf where the original text had been removed. He climbed three rungs on the ladder and reached to place the volume.
The monks ancient hand came down like a hatchet, knocking the tome free of his grip and leaving it sprawled open on the floor. Carol looked up in surprise, holding his wrist. There was going to be a bruise there tomorrow for sure.
The creature bid him pick the book up and walked away. Carol did so without question and followed in silence. The two of them walked for what felt like hours. His light footsteps completely overwhelmed by the echo of the monk’s heavy march.
In time they reached the grey place.
Carol looked up at the creature, Silas’s book clutched in both hands. The monk only stared back, watching him. Carol raised the book to eye level, taking one long, last look at it.
“Sorry, Boy,” He whispered, “You brought this on yourself.”
With that he tossed the book, fluttering like a wounded bird, onto the piles of vellum leaf mold; the Book of Silas, forgotten. Irrelevant.
