?2018?
Isaac woke up with the sensation that his brain was aggressively seeking a change of scenery. His legs were tangled through the now-horizontal step ladder. He felt a sting across the left side of his face and performed a quick investigation with his index finger, finding there to be blood dripping from what felt like a rather long cut.
Isaac saw Donny kneeling next to him with a wide-eyed expression on his face and a screwdriver in his hand. He looked around for the culprit and saw the disassembled clock was in pieces on the floor. Isaac felt equally triumphant and embarrassed.
“Are you okay?” Donny asked. “I was walking by when you fell; you were out for a few seconds.”
“Yeah, I have stuff for it in my backpack. I’ll survive,” Isaac replied as he struggled to lift himself off the ground. He spotted a pair of black leather shoes sticking from the bottom of sand-coloured slacks, headed rapidly for his location.
“Have you made enough noise?” demanded the newcomer. Isaac sat up and looked up at Benjamin Schafer, the assistant librarian.
Ben—Beige to those who weren’t his friends, which is to say most of his employees—was a shortish, well-groomed twenty-five-year-old with circular wire-framed glasses. The pointy nose they were perched on, constantly seeming to slip toward the end, was perpetually aimed toward the sky as if its owner had caught a whiff of something unpleasant, which could have been the hairspray used to keep his too-neat wave of brown hair in place. He had grown up in a slightly richer area of town, gone to an Ivy League school, and made sure everyone around him knew it, not that Isaac or Donny ever bothered to retain the information.
Beige raised an eyebrow and folded his arms across his brown sweater-vest while he waited for an answer.
“He slipped while he was fixing the clock and fell,” Donny told him, not bothering to mask his dislike of his boss’s assistant in his tone, a position his employees reminded him of any time he exerted any authority, as they all knew he reported to Olivia Sheridan.
Beige narrowed his eyes and looked down at Isaac, noting that he was conscious and thus not in need of special attention.
“You know where the first aid kit is,” Beige said condescendingly. “Get back to work.” He turned on his heels and marched away.
“I have a theory that Beige’s birth took place at the centre of a pentagram in a dungeon somewhere,” Donny said in a faint voice as he pulled Isaac to his feet. Isaac snorted in amusement and cleaned up his mess. Donny took the step ladder from him.
“I’ll put this away. You go back to the desk,” Donny ordered, pointing sternly at Isaac’s seat across the room. Isaac nodded in thanks and did as he was told.
Once he made it to his chair, Isaac pulled a small, plastic briefcase from the bottom drawer on his right. A large, red cross-shaped sticker was plastered across the lid. He opened the kit in search of peroxide but found there was none; instead, he applied a bit of generic-brand antibiotic gel and an Avengers bandage. The Avengers were his own contribution; he, Olivia, and Beige, the only ones who bothered, took turns supplying the first aid kit. There were still a few Disney Princess bandages from Olivia’s last box scattered within, and an unopened pack that was plain beige.
After placing the first aid kit back in its drawer, Isaac dug his aspirin and a plastic bottle of water from his backpack. He took the medicine underneath the desk, knowing Beige would have a fit if he saw an employee taking pills while working, even something readily available for sale at any convenience store.
It was several hours before anything remotely interesting happened. Isaac passed the time spinning in his chair, making contraptions from office supplies, and pretending to work on the computer any time the not-boss looked his way. The reflection in the darkened, sleeping computer screen was his normal, blue-eyed self. Not so much as a dot of red on him.
That couldn’t have been your imagination. You’re not that creative, Panic said in his ear.
Maybe? the thought continued.
Next time I talk to Dr. Williams, I’ll ask about changing the dosage on my sleep meds, Isaac told himself, though it didn’t stop the memory from nagging at him.
A brief time later, Donny reappeared. He was fighting to suppress a giggling fit and glancing over his shoulder every few minutes. Isaac raised a curious eyebrow at him.
“Beige was cleaning out his car on his break, and I cracked an egg under the passenger seat while his back was turned,” Donny explained. “I don’t think he spotted me; I got away pretty quick.”
“You know, one of these days he will convince Olivia to fire you,” Isaac said, letting out a sigh that almost immediately morphed into laughter, which Donny eagerly joined. After a beat, the former looked at his reflection on the computer screen again. The red-eyed reflection he saw in the clock face remained an odd, unsettling memory.
Something weird is definitely going on today, Panic insisted. Whoever that was in the glass could be part of it, or even part of you.
“Weird question, but do my eyes look off to you at all?” Isaac asked as he removed his glasses and opened his eyes as wide as he could.
“You mean beside the fact that if you open them any bigger you could be in A Clockwork Orange?” Donny asked derisively. “Did that fall give you some kind of brain damage?”
“Don’t worry Don, you’re still the reigning champ in that arena,” Isaac told his friend with a tight-lipped smirk.
Donny laughed, made an impolite gesture, and departed to disturb someone else’s peace.
See? The eye thing was just my imagination, Isaac thought. If only it was that active with a pen and paper handy, once in a while.
At 5:50 PM, Beige started warning people to finish what they were doing before the library closed. The population of the library steadily filed through the front door, pouring out to wherever their night was taking them.
As always, the assistant librarian made sure to leave with the crowd. Technically, it was his responsibility to close the library down at night, but in practice it was handled by whoever left last. Tonight, like most nights, that honour fell to Isaac.
This suited him fine. When the customers and coworkers cleared out, the library felt like it did when he was younger. He was safe and could hide in hundreds of different worlds when his became too much. Though he had a hard time explaining it to those closest to him, this feeling was the main reason he had pursued the job here. Having his best friend around certainly helped, but Donny never fully understood why Isaac loved stuffy old libraries so much; he tended to flip lazily through magazines until he couldn’t resist testing his friend’s attention span any longer, defeating the purpose of being there.
Isaac grabbed his backpack, took the key to the library, and made a show of locking up and heading home until everyone, namely Donny and Beige, was out of sight. Once they were, he pulled his car into a dark corner to the side of the building and snuck back in.
Isaac turned on a single light in the central room and took a familiar, winding path to a large, rectangular table in the far back corner with a view of the mountains to the north through a large window, tucked behind the Fiction section and hidden from most points in the building. The convoluted route was according to a hand-drawn map Donny had scribbled months previously of the ideal ways to sneak past the library’s security cameras without being spotted.
The moonlight over Denali makes Alaska look like a scene out of some vampire story, Panic babbled. Isaac reminded himself that such things were merely fantasy, and at any rate they appealed to the bookworm in him. He placed his bag on the surface and took his usual seat facing the window. After a breath, he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of spiral notebooks, one black and one blue.
Isaac looked through the black one first. In a slanted scribble the word “Summary” was written on the first line of the first page. Underneath was a single, barely legible sentence: “Young hero, war? Lost family, adventure to find.”
Isaac stared at the sentence, waiting impatiently for his synapses to connect the idea to something. The remaining twenty-five lines on the page, and every page past it, was completely blank. He dug out a pen and held it steady above the paper. He slowly, deliberately lowered his hand until the writing utensil touched the surface.
A vague spark fired off somewhere inside his skull, but before he could register anything, it vanished.
Isaac slumped back in his chair, not taking his eyes from the notebook. He recited the summary a few times while tapping the pen on his scalp with each syllable. Nothing.
Isaac swept the blue book aside and replaced it with the black one. This one was also blank. He began to write something about a spaceship but lost his train of thought. He tossed the notebook on the floor with a growl of frustration.
Pausing to take a breath, Isaac picked the book back up and stacked it neatly on top of the blue one. He then got up to wander through the stacks, searching for inspiration of some kind.
“Brown… Burgess… Butcher…” he mumbled to himself as he scanned the bookshelves. Most of the books that stood out to him, he had already read at least a dozen times. He followed the shelves, which he had ensured earlier were all in the correct order, and hooked around to the next one.
On the middle D shelf, he noticed a small arrow drawn in dust. He hadn’t seen it when he had done his rounds just an hour and a half before. It pointed in the direction he was going anyway, so he followed it. At the end of the shelf, he spotted a pair of pages sticking out from the back of an incorrectly shelved copy of ‘The War of the Worlds’. He removed the book from the shelf.
“Damn it all, someone’s been tearing pages out again, I’ll have to tell Olivia tomorrow,” Isaac grumbled under his breath as he gently pulled the loose pages out. They were stiff, with wrinkles that seemed to have a new story buried in each crease. The sheets were a shade of yellow that likely came with great age, or certain liquids left on them to dry.
Isaac didn’t know of any book in the library that looked this way—and he knew a fair portion of the books in this library.
He attempted to read the rogue pages, mesmerised by his new discovery. The text was in some foreign or fictional language that resembled musical notation in loops and spirals. In the top left corner of the first page was a slightly faded painting of a person.
Whether the subject was male or female, he couldn’t quite tell; their delicate yet fiercely angular features lent an androgyny not entirely unlike a young David Bowie, only with scarlet eyes, silver hair, and slightly pointed ears. Isaac felt as though the image was looking through him.
Underneath, written in the same strange script but steadily warping into English characters, read Næ’zätæmém.
Isaac stared at the word, then moved on to scan the rest of the text, which he was certain was done manually rather than mechanically, wishing to understand what he was seeing.
Almost as soon as the thought had crossed his mind, the letters seemed to glow for less than a second, and in the time it took Isaac to blink, his brain began to see them in English. Isaac’s pulse began to pick up its pace as he continued to scan the page. Simple words began to transform for his eyes first, but there were many he still couldn’t comprehend. Still, he carefully took in every word as if it were the last story he would ever read.