When the bookcase stopped rattling, Alex gripped its right side and pulled. It swung out from the wall like a door, revealing a two-story circular chamber lined with bookshelves. Though it was still afternoon, the sky through the glass dome above her glowed the luminous blue of early dusk. The air felt slightly balmy and she could smell orange blossoms on the air.
Lethe had a limited amount of room, so the library had been rigged with a telescope portal, using magic borrowed from Scroll and Key and deployed by the late Lethe delegate
Richard Albemarle when he was still only a Dante. You wrote down the subject you sought in the Albemarle Book, placed it in the bookcase, and the library would kindly retrieve a selection of volumes from the Lethe House collection, which would be waiting
for you when you swung open the secret door. The full collection was located in an underground bunker beneath an estate in Greenwich and was heavily weighted toward the
history of the occult, New Haven, and New England. It had an original printing of Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and fifty-two different translations of its text, the complete works of Paracelsus, the secret diaries of Aleister Crowley and Francis Bacon, a
spell book from the Zoroastrian Fire Temple in Chak Chak, a signed photo of Calvin Hill,
and a first edition of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale along with a spell written on a Yankee Doodle napkin that revealed the book’s secret chapters. But good luck finding
a copy of Pride and Prejudice or a basic history of the Cold War that didn’t focus entirely on the faulty magic used in the wording of the Eisenhower Doctrine.
The library was also a little temperamental. If you weren’t specific enough in your request or if it couldn’t find books on your desired subject, the shelf would just keep
shaking and eventually start to give off heat and emit a high, frantic whine, until you snatched the Albemarle Book and murmured a soothing incantation over its pages while
gently caressing its spine. The portal magic also had to be maintained through a series of
elaborate rites conducted every six years.
“What happens if you guys miss a year?” Alex had asked when Darlington first showed
her how the library worked.
“It happened in 1928.”
“And?”
“All of the books from the collection crowded into the library at once and the floor collapsed on Chester Vance, Oculus.”
“Jesus, that’s horrible.”
“I don’t know,” Darlington had said meditatively. “Suffocating beneath a pile of books
seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant.”
Alex always approached the library with caution and didn’t get near the bookcase when
it was shaking. It was too easy to imagine some future Darlington joking about the delicious irony of ignorant Galaxy Stern being fatally clocked in the jaw by rogue knowledge.
She set her bag down on the circular table at the room’s center, the wood inlaid with a
map of constellations she didn’t recognize. It was strange to Alex that the smell of books
was always the same. The ancient documents in the climate-controlled stacks and glass cases of Beinecke. The research rooms at Sterling. The changeable library of Lethe House.
They all had the same scent as the fluorescent-lit reading rooms full of cheap paperbacks
she’d lived in as a kid.
Most of the shelves were empty. There were some heavy old books on New Haven
history and a glossy paperback titled New Haven Mayhem! that had probably been sold in tourist shops. It took Alex a minute to realize that one shelf was packed with reprints of
the same slender volume— The Life of Lethe: Procedures and Protocols of the Ninth House, initially hardbound and then stapled together more cheaply when Lethe lost some of its pretensions and began watching its budget.
Alex reached for the most recent edition, the year 1987 stamped on its cover. It had no
table of contents, just pages reproduced crookedly on a copier with the occasional note in
the margin, and a ticket stub for Squeeze playing the New Haven Coliseum. The Coliseum
was long gone, demolished for apartments and a community-college campus that had