The Library of Ashes

The Library of Ashes has a sort of beauty, the beauty of charcoal drawings and sepia toned photos. It’s colours are all muted, the air is a constantly moving stream of small particles - misting the eyes and giving the impression that at any minute the entire edifice might collapse into dust.

It ought to catch at the throat, to make it hard to breath - but it doesn’t. Instead there’s a slight sweet woodsmoke smell carried on the ceaseless current of cool air.

I’d always found it a calm place to be, I know my father had found it disturbing to see the shadows of books, writhing as they reformed themselves in the library. But I was fascinated by the twinness of it, seeing the book shape and coalesce here that was so obviously the after image of its destruction. I could picture quite clearly that other book, the real book burning and disintegrating in the flames of some far off inferno. Far off was the key, here was silence and rebirth.

I had been spending more and more time in the library since he died. Even though he had disliked the place, it was here I felt closest to him, expecting every minute to emerge out of the end of a shelf or wave through the ashy air.

We had often come together - to visit my Aunt who was a librarian still. I saw her occasionally and she would sign hello to me but I hadn’t made an appointment to speak to her. To go through to the little room at the back of the library with its collection of forlorn furniture, tea stained mugs and the remains of a biscuit selection - just the nasty coconut ones no one ever wants to eat.

I had gone once though, after my father died, to tell her the news. She had looked sad but distantly so, as if I was telling her of something about a childhood friend, as if my father hadn’t visited every week of his life. Hadn’t been her only connection to the outside world. Hadn’t been the only one who still cared. I was too angry to talk to her after that and for weeks I wouldn’t even sign back to her. But I didn’t stop coming.

It was my retreat from the outside world. The place where nothing was expected of me. I would stand for hours entranced by the shades of books burning in reverse, their real selves slowly curling and turning to the ashes that would become the shadow books of the library.

I knew I was avoiding my problems but wasn’t that the point? No one could find me here, no one tried to make me talk, no one had to tell me how worried they were about me.

The idea of becoming a librarian had grown on me slowly. I remembered in the time before, because now all time was divided into before and after his death, I had been baffled as to why my Aunt chose to waste her days here. Though I loved the library I had also loved the world outside, its colours and noise, I’d wanted to do things. Normal things like go to university, travel, see the world and then spend the next 6 months talking about how the experience had really changed me. Now I was changing in all the wrong ways. I was collapsing and being reassembled as some shadow form of myself.

And so it seemed the library was the proper place for me.

It’s not hard to become a librarian, you just have to give up everything. There’s a short ceremony.

The ritual is at midnight but I have been here for hours already. There’s no one I care to say goodbye to. You aren’t required to dress up but I have, a little. I am wearing a long red satiny skirt I used to like and a simple scoop necked top. I thought I ought to wear a colour as it’s the last time but I feel gaudy and unlike myself. I can’t remember when I last ate anything but I am not hungry, my mind is fixed on waiting.

It’s almost midnight when a librarian beckons me through. We go through the familiar back room and then another door. I feel something like curiosity - before I had often wondered what there was here behind the carved wooden doors, now they were places with which I would grow intimately acquainted.

The librarian leading me pulled back her grey hood and gave me a small smile.

‘Would you like a tea or a glass of water dear?’

I shook my head feeling strangely scandalised. Like she isn’t taking this seriously.

‘Well then we’ll just head right through, the others are waiting’

She looked at me expectantly so I mumbled an ‘ok’ my voice feeling rusty and cracked from lack of use.

There were about twenty of them gathered in what looked a little like a chapel. It had a high stone roof soaring above austere stone columns. One of the librarians was wearing robes of a slightly darker grey and a silver necklace from which hung a small seal ring. She stood behind a covered table on which sat a candle and a small book bound in a soft grey cloth.

She raised her head as I walked in and I felt a frisson of surprise. It was my Aunt, she had never told us she had become the head librarian. She smiled shyly at me.

For the first time I hesitated.

‘Welcome applicant’ they chanted in unison.

‘You are hear to bind yourself to the library’ my aunt continued.

‘You will bind you will to its conservation, you will bind you mind to its shelves and your body to its walls. You will forget your life outside and remember to never speak in the library’

‘I will’

I croaked. My Aunt picked up the book and candle and held them out to me. I took the book double handed.

‘Now you say - I sacrifice my life to the Library of Ashes-‘

I looked down at the book, something about its weight in my hand was familiar even though the cover of plain grey cloth was not. I flipped open the front cover and there on the first page was the inscription ‘To Hannah, seeing you grow up has been the greatest joy of my life. I hope you love this book half as much as I love you- Dad’

Dad had never been an effusive person, I remembered how surprised I had been by that dedication when I had read it for the first time, two years ago now on my 18th Birthday.

My hand trembled as I eyed the candle.

‘Take the candle too’ my Aunt proffered it again. But sensation was returning now to my my numb mind, my throat constricted uncomfortably making it difficult to swallow.

‘I have to burn the book?’ I whispered between dry lips.

My Aunt didn’t speak but she nodded encouragingly.

A severe looking woman behind her spoke up. ‘Acolytes must be willing to give up all their connections to their former life. The ashes of the book will live on in the library, as will you.’

The red of my skirt caught my eye, it no longer seemed gaudy but richly, sumptuously alive. And I was alive too, it struck me for the first time that my father hated the library of ashes, not because of the smoke, the smell, the creeping shadows but because it had taken his sister from him. How old had she been? I had never asked.

But did that matter, now he was gone? He was never coming back. I held my finger close to the burning candle willing myself to reach out and touch it. But the warmth flowed down my fingers, calling me back towards life again.