The Book of All Secrets

The air had a stillness to it, broken only by the haze of dust motes commuting lazily down in the shafts of sunlight from the vaulted windows in the Reading Room. At 4:30 in the afternoon on a hot sumer day, it was as if the whole library was drifting into a heat-induced slumber. The few souls that were diligently still studying or reading had heads bent over books, bodies leant against the stacks and breathing slow and somnambulant.

Clara was fighting a losing battle with trying not to doze off herself. As her head did the five-second sleep jerk for the tenth time she knew she had to stand up or risk sliding off her chair and under the desk, giving up the battle completely. Her PhD thesis on ‘Methodological Parameters of Parapsychology of the 19th and 20th Century’ was, to say the least, slow going.

Privately, she’d been considering giving up. The field of parapsychology wasn’t exactly mainstream and her Professor had been mumbling about where her thesis was going to lead, if she ever finished it. Her part-time job in the speciality health food shop paid peanuts; literally sometimes if the takings were low, and she couldn’t afford her share of the rent on the pokey flat she shared with her fitness instructor friend Georgie.

The somewhat niche field of study had been largely due to a childhood spent listening to her grandmother have conversations with her grandfather. Given that he was dead, these had a very one-sided quality, but G-G strongly maintained her long dead husband conversed back ‘tap-tap through the ether’ and that he oversaw everything from when to water the tomatoes to what numbers she should play on the Lotto. G-G’s absolute conviction that voices could speak from beyond the grave rubbed off on Clara and she developed a determination to prove her grandmother right. Or wrong.

Taking a deep breath and mentally shaking herself awake, Clara wandered over to one of the avenues of books where she’d spent much of the last two years. Floor to ceiling, rows and rows of books bore witness to, well not much really. The library was rarely a place of any excitement other than the occasional swear word as a heavy tome hit a foot or head.

So familiar to Clara were these massed ranks of texts and treaties that she didn’t even think about it as she pulled out one of her favourites, the first edition of ‘How to Speak to the Dead’ by that elusive author, Anonymous. At over 100 years old, the book was dry and crisp with age giving off that scent of musty old paper beloved of antiquarian bookshops.

As Clara looked down to open the book she realised that there was something inside the thick front cover, snug against the faded frontispiece. Not unusually for the types of books Clara borrowed, she was pretty sure she’d been the only person to take the book off the shelf in a decade or more and as it was so old, borrowing it was forbidden. Instantly she was wide-awake.

Slowly opening the cover she revealed a delicately thin but perfectly clean little black book.

She had the uncanny sensation she was being watched but looking along the aisle she couldn’t see another person in sight. She was aware that sometimes her scholarly if spooky subject matter went a little bit to her head. Her flat mate Georgie was always telling her she was imagining it when Clara was convinced someone, usually G-G, was talking in the other room.

Acting on an impulse (something she rarely did), she cast a furtive eye around to make sure nobody was watching her, extracted the black book from within the peaceful folds of its resting place, replaced the old text on the shelf and discreetly popped the book into her pocket.

As nonchalantly as she could she walked even further down the aisle, round the corner to the darkest corner of the Reading Room and bent over the Returns trolley that was shoved up against an aisle. Pretending to look for something on the trolley but really driven by an urgent desire to open the black book, she took it out of her pocket and slowly opened the cover.

On the front page was a series of numbers. As a virtual full-time inhabitant of the library she instantly recognised them as a call number, the unique number assigned to every book in a library.

Flicking the rest of the pages only to find them blank, she realised there was only one thing to do – find the book that the call number related to.

The library was as familiar to her as her own home, even more so in fact. She loved its thousands of shelves, the worn old wood of the desks, the ceilings that seemed to enfold the humanity within, both of the living scholars and the millions of words written within the books it held.

Barely registering where she was heading, her feet took off determinedly, uncontrolled by her. Veering suddenly left and then halting two steps further on, she could have sworn the books themselves were whispering to her as there, perfectly at eye level, was the spine with the call number from the black book.

Looking once again left and right and seeing nobody, she hefted the large hardback book off the shelf. Loftily titled ‘Phantasms of the Dead Old Souls and How they Speak to the Living Vol III’, it was a book Clara felt was both familiar and yet completely new.

Extraordinarily weighty in her hands, she had to lean the spine against the shelf so she didn’t drop it. Judging it to be getting on for 1,000 pages, the book fell neatly open half way.

The pages on the right hand side were sharply carved away to reveal a secret compartment within the book. Fitting perfectly within the cavity, lay a pristine bundle of bank notes secured with a thin paper belt.

Clara couldn’t believe her eyes! What was this? Well it was obviously money but how had it got there? What was she to do with it?

Hesitating for no more than a moment, she easily retrieved the bundle of notes, which bizarrely almost seemed to reach out for her hand. Squirreling it away in her other pocket, she mentally congratulated herself on wearing her charity shop skirt with enormous pockets that day.

Taking a moment to compose herself and calm her breathing while she wondered if she’d just crossed a line into theft, or at least daylight robbery, her hand reached again for the little black book.

For the second time she opened the cover. This time, instead of the book call number that had been written there before, there were seven words written in beautiful italic writing.

“Oh well done. Turn over the page."

What was going on? In all of her studies into the history of the paranormal, psychics, pseudo-psi, ESP and the psychology of magic, she’d never heard of, and certainly never experienced anything like this. Books that have secret disappearing writing and speak in code, never! Her doctoral thesis was going to blow them out of the water now.

Turning the page, she saw another call number. Wasting no time and once again being led by a seemingly independent force, she was off down the worn carpet, across the vestibule and into the round Companion Room, now completely empty at this time of day.

This was a blessing as although the room was smaller, it had less camouflage of shelving, being as it was circular, with books shelved around its circumference. Gravitating straight down the middle of the room she was soon staring at a spine with the call numbers from the second page.

‘Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author’s Experiences’ was the title of another huge volume as Clara double checked once again to see that she was alone as she reached for the book.

Was she imagining it or did the book actually sigh as she opened it? There, again, was another tight, neat bundle of bank notes staring up at her. And again, they virtually jumped into her hand as she lifted them from their hidden spot.

Now, with pockets somewhat bulging with cash, she was just about to reach for what she considered ‘her’ black book, when the gentle bing-bong of the ten-minute bell came over the tannoy, signifying the library was about to close for the day.

For what she instinctively knew would be the final time, Clara opened the black book, turned over the first two, now blank pages, and saw the new italic words.

“We can but question all thinGs around us and be prepared to never avail of answers. But we must never Give up questioning.”

Putting the black book back in her pocket and shoving her hands protectively over the money, she quickly walked back to her desk. Not wanting to get stuck in the library overnight but even keener to escape with the money, she closed all the books from the day, leaving them in a neat pile on the desk.

Quite alone now as the last people drifted towards the exit and home for cold drinks and lazy summer dinners, she put the two bundles of cash in her huge duffel bag, covered them with her notebooks, pencil case and cardigan and kneed her chair back under the desk.

Knowing its work was done and realising the book was merely loaned, not given, she felt for the black book in her pocket and placed it gently on top of the desk with a little tap-tap. In the morning a librarian would find it and wonder who was missing a small, unused black notebook. It would get placed in Lost Property to be claimed, although it never would, disappearing unnoticed sometime later.

While she never finished her thesis, the $20,000 she found in the library meant that Clara was able to jack in the job at the health food shop and write full time for a year. Pretending to heed the sage advice of her Professor who said the paranormal would never pay big money, she left the university after securing a record sum for a debut novel. Set in a magical library ‘The Book of All Secrets’, was an instant bestseller.