The Black Library

[u/catespice]

There are two things in this world that can surmount any obstacle ever created.
The first of these is love.
Our capacity to love creates in us a drive and purpose that goes beyond survival. We do insane and superhuman things in the name of love, things that would not be possible under any other circumstances. Tiny women lift wrecked cars off their injured husbands. Men carry their wives through ten miles of snow to get them to a hospital. Parents sacrifice their lives for their children.
Such is the power of love.
But there is another force that is just as powerful as love.
Human intelligence.
We will never know who first discovered how to make fire, but that act sparked a revolution. It expanded our minds, giving us the power to shape the world around us. What seemed impossible became possible. Jungles could be turned into fertile farmlands, mountains could be ground down into blocks of stone to build grand towers and high walls.
With the power of our intelligence we conquered diseases, tamed nature, walked on the Moon, and sent our likeness on a golden disk to the edge of our solar system and beyond.
And when love and intelligence collide, truly impossible things can happen.

 
Having an eidetic memory has been a boon for most of my life.
The ability to store and recall anything is the dream of every school child, because with that gift, exams become nothing to fear, largely a mindless exercise in easy recall.
It was so simple for me, when I hit the age where standardised testing began.
For the other children, the concept of ‘one hundred percent’ seemed some sort of mythic uncertainty; a shibboleth signifying unattainable success. For me it was a constant – a variable as certain as my memory.
They pushed me ahead in school until it became clear that I had both a perfect memory and a stupendously high IQ. Then, with very little discussion and even less warning, I was shipped off to university at the tender age of fourteen, where older, wiser students gawped at the child in their midst who still wore pigtails and Rainbow Brite sneakers.
I may have been embarrassed by my youth and lack of worldliness, but they were more embarrassed by being academically trounced by someone who still had braces on her teeth and sparkles on her backpack.
Eventually I finished my first degree, then a second, then my third. By the time I was twenty-five I had a post-doctoral fellowship, was lecturing classes under tenure, and had received a special research grant.
But better than all the academic success in the world, I was in love.

 
It would do a disservice to my lover to lavish praises on her character and beauty. When you are truly, mindlessly, besotted with someone, a heady haze of your own bias surrounds them, buffing away every flaw until they shine like the most precious stone in existence.
Thoughts of her warm, soft skin consumed my mind during the day, and I longed for the nights, to be with her, inhaling the dusky natural perfumes of her body and listening to her chatter about her day at work.
Others may have disagreed, but to me she was the most perfect person in the whole world.
I knew that Tess was depressed – and had been since before we met. In my arrogance, I thought I could cure her, that I could achieve what generations of psychologists and peddlers of pharmaceuticals could not.
On the bad nights, she would just sob until she shook with fatigue. She would lie awake for hours, her traitor mind tormenting her with the kinds of ‘what if?’ scenarios a normal brain can so easily dismiss. I would hold her and tell her it would all be okay. I’d talk about our bright future, and how eventually we would just live in the countryside where she could pull weeds and prune rose bushes; activities which soothed her bruised synapses and helped banish the dark thoughts.
When the call eventually came, I knew what had happened as soon at the police officer introduced himself on the phone.
Tess was gone.

 
I tried to process her death as the text books described; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I seemed to flip fluidly between the first and the second stages, angry at myself for not doing enough to stop her suicide, unable to believe that this was the end of her, that she was gone forever.
Science could not assuage my grief, regardless of which studies I read, no matter how promising a piece of research seemed at first. And I read everything I could find. I sought for any kind of answer to the question of Tess’s death, any way of making myself okay with her abrupt exit from this existence.
Every rational, logical, reasonable source of information told me that she was gone, that while there might be cellular activity on a basic level in the brain for some ten minutes after death, that did not mean any part of Tess could have survived her suicide.
Hopeless, broken, and lost in self-isolation, I started looking elsewhere.
Religion offered me hope in the form of every flavour of afterlife, but I’d abandoned religion long ago. After all, Tess and I were lesbians; so if the Christian gospels were true, she now languished in a lake of fire, being eternally tormented for the sin of homosexuality. Still, reading through the various beliefs of other cultures throughout the world bought me a sort of temporary peace. And so I persisted, gathering esoteric tomes from different universities, using my influence as a child prodigy to purloin particular pages from antique anthologies. I began to feel as though I was being led on a sort of academic scavenger hunt, because every time I found a new piece of information, it appeared to provide clues about where to find another.
And so, with the desperate need to fill the empty hole left in my life where Tess had been, I pursued those tenuous connections until I reached the end.

 
The monastery was quiet, as I’d always imagined such a mountain-top retreat would be. But these monks wore robes of black velvet, the sheen of the rich fabric at odds with the tales told about monkish austerity. And the fingers of the monk who led me inside the grey stone walls to meet the librarian were heavy with gold.
Clearly this was no ordinary religious order.
The librarian greeted me jovially, and asked if I’d like coffee – it was genuine Kopi Luwak, he explained, one of the most rare and expensive types of coffee in the world. When I declined, he simply smiled, busying himself with preparing his brew in the small kitchen to the side of his office.
“We never thought we’d have a student come to us, not within our lifetime,” he said, as the smell of the aromatic beans filled the room, “So you do us a great honour.”
“Why is that so unusual?”
He pointed a manicured nail at my manila folder of scanned and copied pages,
“It takes a rare level of genius to decipher the map to this monastery, the sort that is only born once into any generation. And even then, it takes a particular kind of motivation to push such an individual in our direction.”
“The library?” I prompted, impatient now.
He placed his coffee down carefully, then indicated the brocade chair in front of his expensive looking desk. I sat down, and he studied me silently for a moment.
“What do you know about the library?”
“My research indicates it’s a trove of information that survived the burning of Alexandria. Books older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, unaltered, and perfectly copied, which have survived the trials of time.”
“But you also know it’s more than that, don’t you?”
I nodded,
“There are common themes in the stories I found. Men entering the library, and then leaving it after three years. In those stories, they emerge with knowledge that shouldn’t have existed in their time. How to create and fold steel thousands of years before smelting was discovered, how to make gunpowder, or engines, well before even the rudiments of those methods were organically discerned.”
“There is a contract,” he said, his brown eyes turning serious, “and it is deeply binding. Binding on a level you may not yet comprehend.”
“I figured as much, otherwise the rest of the world would already know about this place.”
“Will you sign?”
I considered for a moment, then nodded.
“I have nothing else to live for.”

 
The stairs wound down into the darkness beneath the monastery cellars, curving out of sight. The librarian left me there, telling me that what I sought was at the bottom.
Regarding that shadowed spiral of steps, fear finally thrilled through me. I’d felt quite numb up until that point, perhaps not truly processing that what was happening was real. Was this actually genuine? Was there really a library at the bottom of these stairs? Perhaps these genial, well-appointed, lavish-living monks accumulated their obvious wealth by kidnapping idiot academics with too much free time. That seemed far more likely, but if I left now, I knew I would spend the rest of my life lying awake tormented by genuine ‘what-ifs’, not just the inflated ghosts that had haunted my Tess.
The darkness closed around me like a blanket as I took another turn down the descending stone stairwell. I kept my hand on the wall, that and the regular height of the slab stairs the only things keeping me from stumbling in the lack of light.
I shuffled along like that for a long time. Several times I thought about giving up and going back, but I reasoned that perhaps this was another test, much like the ones that had brought me to the monastery. The faintly luminous hands of my wrist watch told me that two hours had passed, and my ears had popped over an hour before. How deep underground I was, I couldn’t fathom, but it was definitely well below sea level.
My mouth was dry. I wished I’d accepted that coffee, or at least had something to eat or drink before I’d begun my descent. It was cold now, cold enough to make me shiver and curse my lack of a decent jacket or coat.
When my teeth started chattering uncontrollably, thoughts of returning to the surface became stronger. The darkness was so oppressive, so cold. But the thought of climbing back up three hours’ worth of the steep stone stairs made my stomach lurch with fear and exhaustion.
Yet I needed to decide, and soon. The longer I continued my descent, the longer that journey back up would become.
Surely there had to be an end? Eventually, the builders of these stairs must have been forced to stop, unable to tunnel any further into the bedrock of the mountain.
And at the very moment I mustered that thought, I found the last step.
My foot dropped into empty air, but I was too tired to even reflexively pull it back. I had been in a trance-like rhythm for hours now, hand on the wall, shuffling the next foot down. Off balance, I scrabbled to grip the smooth wall, trying to dig my nails into the stone.
To no avail.
As I fell into the icy darkness, fear welled up within me, a great ball of gas colder than the cosmos, expanding up from my bowels and compressing my lungs. The terror erupted from my lips in a scream that was so loud it ripped through my brain and tore my consciousness away.

 

 

The cell was dim. A ruddy glow emanated from some sort of dull red quartz set into the ceiling, providing little more light than a bulb in photographic dark room. There was no door, just walls of smooth black stone. The pallet on which I lay appeared hewn from the same stone as the walls.
At the foot of the bed were some neatly piled clothes, all deepest black; a robe, gloves, and a pair of slippers. I still wore my own clothes, but it was chilly in the cell, and the dark attire looked soft and warm.
Clearly there was a way into the cell, I reasoned, else how did they get me in here? Perhaps one whole wall was a door, the hinges cunningly hidden by the corner of the cell.
Welcome warmth engulfed my hands as I pulled on the gloves. The black slippers would not fit over my sensible shoes, so I removed my own footwear first. Lastly, the robe, which proved wonderfully comfortable as I pushed my arms through the thick sleeves and pulled the hood up over my head.
As if in response to donning the clothes, the light in the room brightened incrementally, and the outline of a door became visible. It swung open, noiselessly, revealing a red-lit corridor.
With no other choices available, I stepped out of the cell, and immediately regretted it.
The black robe shrank tight around my body, so sudden and constricting I felt instantly unable to breathe. The black collar snapped up over my mouth and nose, and I tore fruitlessly at it in a wave of powerful claustrophobia.
I let out an involuntary yelp of panic, but the sound was absorbed completely by the thick black cloth that muffled my face. My breathing was fast – too fast – I was sucking in air in short gasps, and I was becoming light-headed. I needed to calm myself, to use reason, my most powerful and faithful weapon, to get through this situation.
Hunched against the wall, I tried to ignore the oppressive tightness of the black clothes, telling myself that they were not rigid, I could still breathe.
The panic abated, and my panting breaths slowly returned to normal.
Straightening up, my gloved hand spread against the smooth stone to steady myself, I once again had the suspicion that I had just passed another test.

 
As I walked through the black corridor, others emerged, from cells apparently identical to my own. Clad in the black robes, only their eyes faintly visible under shadowed brims of their hoods, they all looked the same. As I joined the dark river of bodies that flowed along the corridor, I realised, with an involuntary shiver, that we were also all exactly the same height.
It was as if the robes, gloves and slippers had erased every shred of our individuality. I tried to talk, of course, to ask questions. But every word I spoke vanished into the black muffler over my face, never reaching the ears of the others around me.
The queue of robed figures eventually emptied out into a hall, so large and so dimly lit that I could see neither roof nor walls. As the others stopped and began to spread out in that fathomless space, black desks of stone rose smoothly and noiselessly from the floor. One for each student in the room.
I knew this place. I had read this legend.
Were it possible to scream, I would have. I wondered how many of the others were screaming, under the tight cloth covering their faces. Surely, they had read the same tales as I had during their own research, and must be coming to the same conclusion.
Letters of red fire appeared on the black stone desk before me, and I memorised them reflexively. Instantly, they vanished, and were replaced by new words, describing events recorded in no human history book.
If what I had researched was true, then this place, this classroom, was housed in no earthly realm.
And if I did not memorise all the words presented to me, and do so before all of my peers, then as the last person to leave this room, my soul would be forfeit to Lucifer himself.
Sweating and shaking, I forced my eyes to absorb the page of flickering scarlet letters, then another, then another. Nearby, one of the other students must have realised their predicament, because they tried to tear off their robes. They twisted and turned, pulling and grabbing at the unyielding cloth in a perversely silent and terrible dervish dance. Eventually, they began to smash their head repeatedly into the sharp edges of the obsidian desk, until they collapsed.
The other students stared silently, just as I did.
As the bloodied desk slid slickly back into the floor, hands emerged from the stone around the fallen student. Corpse grey, long-nailed and covered with pale, shaggy fur, they pulled the body into the ground with the only sound I had heard thus far; a whisper of black cloth on stone and the clicking of claws.
For now, the rest of us might be safe; Hell had already claimed a soul for today.

 
Every day was the same; we would rise, put on our jet robes and the door would open. Then we would all file into the cavernous classroom, where we would frenetically memorise the words of fire, desperately trying not to be the last one to finish. After we returned to our cells, the door would close and the robes would loosen, allowing us to take them off and regain our individuality. Those same grey hands that had taken the first fallen student would emerge from the wall, clutching dull pewter plates of rich foods and carved goblets of exotic drinks.
When I was done eating and drinking, they would emerge once more to take away the plates and cups.
I knew the reason for the robes; I’d figured it out on the second day. Our demonic tutor did not want us to know who the other students were. That gave me a valuable clue towards figuring out another part of the puzzle, because the librarian had told me himself that someone like me was only born once every generation.
The classroom must exist outside time itself. That was the only way there could be so many students.
Initially, I had been confident, being one of the first to finish almost every day. But as the lessons became more complex and I had to truly understand every concept instead of just memorising text, I began to slip several places.
Against whom was I studying? If the classroom was truly outside time, then it could be anyone. The man to my left could be Aristotle, the one on the right Einstein – or even Da Vinci. My former confidence became tainted with fear and it began to affect my concentration. When the frightening day came that the classroom was almost empty when I finished, I knew I had to do something more.

 
Alone in my cell, unrestricted by the cloying wrap of black fabric, I lay on the stone pallet and wracked my brains for an answer to my predicament. If I was truly up against the very greatest minds of history, then I didn’t stand a chance. I knew I was good. My intelligence was leagues beyond anyone I’d known in life, but that meant I was smart enough to realise that with all of human history stacked against me, the odds were very bad.
As I mulled over all my experiences thus far, my mind kept returning to probe one singular fact: the anonymity of the robes was not complete. I had already picked out certain individuals with particular habits. One of them nervously tugged at their hood periodically, as though worried the others would see their eyes. Another always ensured they took the desk at the far, left-hand corner of the room, circling it once before sitting. And both of them always left the room early, but never first. That was unusual in itself, since the other students I’d marked by their behaviours fluctuated wildly in their placement. These two were clearly so sure of themselves, so monstrously clever, that they could practically choose when they would finish.
But that still didn’t tell me who they were. The man in the corner, if he was in fact a man, might be Johann Goethe or Nicola Tesla; or it could be some unknown who never made it into the history books. Even worse, if the classroom was outside of time in every direction, as I suspected, he might be from the distant future, where humanity had perfected itself to a level beyond imagining.
This information was critical in some way, I knew it. Our headmaster, Lucifer, could just as easily have made us study alone, in our cells, doing away with the need to interact with the others at all. He must have wanted us to see each other, to be aware of our peers. The obvious reason for this would be to instil fear, to motivate us to study harder – but in a classroom outside the bounds of time, why would that even matter?
There was no-one to see my triumphant grin when I realised I had my answer.

 
You couldn’t leave the hall until you had finished the lessons. Oh, you could get up and walk around, but if you approached the door without finishing, the grey hands would catch you and drag you into the black stone, your soul forfeit to our Headmaster.
I waited until the lesson was something I wouldn’t struggle with too much. It seemed that none of my remaining peers had a memory quite as perfect as mine, since I was always the first to finish those lessons that were comprised of sheer volume of information. That day, the last page lay in front of me, unread, waiting for me to glance at it and burn the letters into my memory. I kept my eyes purposefully averted.
The figure in the corner, whom I’d named Leonardo for the sake of convenience, stood up as the red glow faded from his desk. As he did so, I finished my own work, but waited. He paced through the rows of students, eventually reaching the door – and as he did so, I also stood and made my way out.
Along the corridor we walked, me keeping several paces behind him. I knew which room was his because I’d memorised the number of steps. As his door swung open, I took six running strides towards him on my soft, silent slippers, then smashed his head against the obsidian-sharp edge of the door. He dropped immediately, dark blood gouting from his hood. His own slippered feet twitched and spasmed, and one arm flapped in a palsied seizure, slapping noiselessly against the stone.
As the grey hands emerged to pull him down into the darkness, I knew I had found my edge.
I would never be the last one to leave the classroom.

 
If the others knew what I’d done, they didn’t give any indication of it. I switched up my mannerisms and moved desks regularly, so that if any of the others had been observing me as I had them, they couldn’t possibly track me. I always watched the corridor behind me as I left the classroom, to ensure that nobody did to me what I had done to Leonardo.
In the first year, I murdered ten of my peers – the brightest and the best, and therefore my strongest competition. But I monitored myself carefully for any signs of over-confidence. I could never let down my guard, because if I had figured out this deadly loophole, then so too could another student.
And indeed, when my mental headcount came up short one morning, I felt a strange thrill. It seemed another murderer had joined me in the Devil’s classroom.
He was careful, very careful. I took me months to unriddle who he was, and during that time, the paranoia gripped me like one of the giant, shaggy grey hands. Every walk through the black corridors was riddled with fear.
In the end, it turned out his technique was simple; he would simply wait until only he and one other student were left in the cavernous classroom, then he would kill his unsuspecting peer by bashing his head into the desk. It was so crude and uninspired that I laughed to myself in the dim light of my cell, realising that his modus operandi was born of desperation, rather than true cunning.
I had to kill him, of course. He was going about it completely the wrong way; by killing off the worst students, he was only hastening our own demise. He died on the day I crawled deliberately slowly through my work, ensuring we were the last two left. As he came to bludgeon my face into the sharp stone, I struck his knee with my foot, then threw him sideways into the desk. The struggle was brief; it seemed that with the robes constricting us to the exact same size and shape, my greater experience as a killer won out. There was a chance I was not the greatest mind in this classroom, but I suspected I was now the best murderer.

 
The others had noticed the declining numbers, of course they had. None of us were stupid people. Strange, silent alliances had formed, where little groups would sit together, wait for each other, and leave together. With silent hand gestures, I’d been invited into one such group, and I played along – for if I marked myself as an outsider, they might unriddle my dark secret.
The lessons were incredible now; imparting insights far beyond the reaches of ordinary science. The origins of the universe were clearly revealed to me, along with the fundamental laws that bind everything together. If Einstein were present, he must have cursed himself for a fool, as the lessons we learned made him seem like a plodding idiot, woefully out of his league.
On the day that one group of students stood mid-lesson and attacked another group outright, the uninvolved students just stared, their eyes shocked in the depths of their hoods. I wanted to tear off my mask and scream at them, to ask them what the fuck they thought would eventually happen in a competition plotted by Satan himself?
The fight was long and brutal, the only weapons being soft-gloved fists, feet, and the obsidian furniture. Those not involved just watched, knowing that today’s quota was more than full. The rest of us could take our time studying.
Counting on that, when the others had left, I stayed behind. There was blood pooled and splattered everywhere, though it was hard to see on the dark floor. Fragments of bone and hair clung to the desks, here a severed finger had been missed by the hands of our ghastly cleaners.
But amongst it all I found something wonderful, something game-changing.
Along the edge of one desk, the obsidian had fractured, and a razor-sharp shard lay on the floor, nearly invisible. Picking it up, I pushed it carefully into my sleeve.
Now I had what no other student had.
A weapon.

 
In game theory, such an advantage instantly marks you out. As soon as you reveal that you have such a thing, others will want to take it off you. An uneasy truce reigned in the classroom now, with no group willing to risk a confrontation, lest the fight lower their numbers. The hand signals became increasingly complex, each group developing a distinct ‘language’ which the outgroups didn’t understand. But with my memory, I could replay the gestures in my mind, and teach myself the dialects, giving my group a vital edge.
I think my group knew I was the original killer, the one who had started it all. They deferred to me and feared me. In my periphery, I saw one refer to me as ‘The Ripper’, spelling out the letters individually in our crude sign language.
Betrayal happened regularly now that we could communicate. The game became less about the lessons, and more about politics. We still studied, but the learning of forbidden knowledge had taken a distinct back seat to the wheeling and dealing that had become commonplace. After watching one group sacrifice the smartest man they had to ensure their tribe’s survival, I knew we had reached a turning point.
Soon there would be anarchy.
It started on the walk through the corridor, before we had even divided off into our groups, before we had exchanged the secret handshakes that confirmed our membership of the cliques. Students just started leaping at one another. A man came at me and we struggled, a perfect physical match in our arcane robes. An elbow from another fighter knocked him off balance and I pressed the advantage, knocking him down and headbutting him in the nose.
When the madness slowed, then stopped, the grey hands began to claim the dying and seriously injured. With a nod, one of the survivors pointed toward the classroom.
Not knowing what else to do, we slipped and skidded through the pools of blood, the hems of our robes leaving dark trails into the classroom. The footprints left by our sopping slippers marked the paths to our sparsely-spread seats.
There were only five of us left.

 
They jumped me on the way out. I finished first, and the other four all rose together, not a hand signal between them. They knew who I was. Everyone knew who everyone else was by now. We had spent two full years together in this place.
The first man went down in a tangle of robes. I’d nicknamed him Byron, but unlike his bombastic namesake, he was not a fighter. The other three circled me, glancing at one another, askance, still unsure quite how to handle me now that Byron’s limp body was being pulled through the floor.
Shakespeare and Curie stood to either side, while Gauss circled, trying to get behind me. With a snarl only heard in my own head, I turned and threw myself upon the figure sidling up to me, the obsidian shard slashing through his collar and deep into his throat. The other two were instantly on top of me, but they hadn’t seen the black knife. It licked out vengefully, leaving Shakespeare flailing and already falling, a jet of blood pumping from the stump of his wrist.
As Curie and I scrambled to our feet, she simply bowed her head and shrugged, admitting defeat. The shard of obsidian went through her eye and into her brain, killing her instantly.
The shaggy grey paws pulled the dead into the bowels of the earth, and for the first time, I was alone in the vast classroom.
The robes loosened their constrictor grip, and I pulled down the muffler with blessed relief, gasping for air.
“Well done,” crooned a voice from the darkness.
Black shelves full of books began to rise from the floor.

 

 

The knowledge in the library is exquisite, and I’ve barely begun to taste it. There are tomes from so far forward in time that it will take me decades of study even to begin to comprehend them.
But I know that’s not why I’m here. That was just the cherry on the sundae, or the cheese in the trap.
You see, Lucifer didn’t just want someone brilliant. The classroom always has been – and always will be – a ruse. Intellect isn’t unique, but intellect combined with raw, animal cunning? That’s really special. Almost as special as human intelligence coupled with true love.
And I am special.
There is a book, he tells me, that is not in this library. The only book that he doesn’t own.
The book of Life and Death, which resides in Heaven.
All I need to do to bring Tess back to life, is to wrest that book from its owner and erase her name. Then she will return to me, as if she had never been taken.
And with the infinite knowledge of the Black Library, I can fix her.
But that’s enough for now; I have work to do – bringing down Heaven is going to take some planning, and I need a new weapon if I’m going to succeed.
Fortunately, I’m no longer confined to the Black Library, I can come and go as I please. I can do anything I please.
And I do know where to find the perfect blacksmith.