Trinity

The thin hiss of a distant ocean rolled around the library’s barrel ceiling. I didn’t have long left to find her. We couldn’t miss our boat. 

I walked past an iron staircase that corkscrewed through the floor and up to a level above. Would climbing to the upper levels offer me a better view of the library and increase my chances of finding her? The shelves of the upper levels were partially visible from where I stood near the library’s heavy doors; they were empty. The books had been stripped from the age-bowed ribs that had held their weight, scavenged by unseen librarians and sent somewhere safer. Fearing the twisting black staircase that led not just to the upper levels and their creaking greyness, but also spiralled down to the darkness that hid the rising tide, I backed away from it, and began to move further into the room.

The room was illuminated by pools of light reflected in the gloss of the polished parquet floor. The reflected light had no source. The pools bled and stretched, moving with me, showing me the detail of what was close, while offering only an impressionist’s sketch of the distant end of the library where a pale shape beckoned.

The shelves around me on the main level were also empty. There had been books here earlier, when we had come to visit, before we had left to catch our boat. The books were gone now.  The other visitors, with their hushed multi-national chatter and curious indifference, were also gone.  She was gone. I had to find her; we must not miss our boat.    

The ceiling-high shelves flanked the main passage of the library, their ends bearing details of the works they had held. Peering at one of the signs I saw only blots of ink, illegible violets swelling and blooming over saturated paper that sagged against the glass of its brass frame.

My need to find her pulled me further into the library, between the two rows marble busts that faced each other from their pedestals at the end of each shelf. The ocean’s hiss grew louder and split now into the suck and pull of its steady pulse.

The busts were all of the same milk-tooth marble, sculpted to softness by the same creator. Some were familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. I looked into the hollow eyes of each one that I passed and felt that they offered me a clue, that their presence increased my chances of finding her. I began to move more quickly along the line of heads, sparing each less time as the light from the floor shaded the sculptor’s cuts and caused marble lips to roll in time with the grinding waves, which grew louder all the time.

 I stopped at the bust of a man I recognised. He had been in the library with us. Horse-broad and wristless, he had examined the books with us during our earlier visit. We had asked him the way to the boat. He had informed us that he too intended to catch the boat and had given us careful instructions, which I could not now remember. I wondered why the books had been removed to safety but the busts had not. Lighter now, rendered in marble, the man did not mind. The water could no longer hurt him. I followed his mineral gaze to a point behind me in the middle of the library’s aisle.

A waist-high display table stood at the mid-point between the heavy entrance doors and the shrouded shape at the opposite end of the room. Inside the table’s display case I saw my mobile phone lying on smooth red baize. A video call was in progress. A woman looked out of the cracked screen, a bright light shining behind her head picking out loose blonde hairs that poked out from under her tight green cap. Her mouth formed words as she stared intently from the phone. The glass of the display case kept her questions from me and the sound of the coming waves surged with the phone’s flashing battery icon. The thumbnail image in the corner of the screen showed only the camera’s point-blank view of the blood red baize that held the phone. Feeling that the woman was trying to help me, I stooped low over the case and began to ask her where I should search. As I opened my mouth water ran from it, a trickle of saline drool at first, beading the surface of the display case’s glass giving the woman the compound eye of an increasingly concerned insect. A wave boomed and a stomach of brine fell from my mouth onto the glass. It splashed to the floor where it ran in the direction of the doors to meet the tide which was now swelling into that end of the drunkenly listing room. Another deep boom from beyond the doors sent a foaming sheet of black water rolling over the floor towards me. As the water touched the leg of the display table the hair-fine crack in the screen of my phone germinated and the woman was gone, lost under a web of jet. 

I ran. My pools of light kept pace and began to flicker, a tint of blue rising in them as iron rose in my salt-ripped throat. Fed by the foaming tide the spars of the shelves groaned from the walls to extend across the aisle in front of me. My need to find her had kept my will strong enough to pass through the lattice, although the gap was far too small for my body.

Moving now in the blue pools of light, the black waters gushing through the creaking shelves behind me, I approached the pale shape. My light leapt to it, glimmering around it, showing me a pedestal. The word Trinity was carved into it, below the dripping fringe of a plastic sheet that hooded the bust that it held.

With a final surge the howling tide took me and swallowed my light.

Rising as wine-dark water, I flowed over the contours of the bust as the hood floated away. Sightless but irresistible, I caressed the face that I knew so well, carved cold and still by the sea.  

I had found her, and I knew that we had not missed our boat.