The Labyrinth of Whispers

It was said she was made of words, created from stanzas and lyrical sentences that came to life to form her being. She had always been there, silently tucking books into their proper places, her ocean-blue hair like a bird fluttering between the shelves. She looked young but her eyes were old. Her skin was covered in stories, black and grey and purple ink bleeding into clocks and hearts and names that children would often whisper among themselves to guess their origin. Some speculated she bore the names of those she had lost, others that the names referred to places that were important to her. Still others told stories deep in the night of a witch with blue hair who lured children to her lair and engraved the names of her victims into her arms.

The girl didn’t mind. In fact, she hardly seemed to notice these rumors at all. When she spotted faces peeking behind books at her with curious eyes, she didn’t notice their fear or suspicion. She simply filled the children’s arms with books and sent them on their way. Sometimes she would gather a group of children and tell them stories of her own, descriptive and picturesque tales of pages that whispered and secrets that leaked between the covers if one only listened hard enough. On more than one occasion, she would pause mid-sentence and cock her head as if to listen, and her audience could never tell whether these pauses were part of her performance.

The girl enjoyed her work, the creak of novels cracked open, the musty smell of pages. But her real work began after the doors were locked and the building emptied. At night, the library spoke to her. She wandered among the aisles and felt voices rushing like wind against her face. She whispered into this symphony with a voice like a bluebird’s, and the books replied with their secrets. They moaned their fears like an escalating opera, and the girl followed the trail of their voices to find its source. She followed the scarlet thread of the Fates, scaled the cliffs of English moors until she found the places where the song bottomed out and gave way to the deep, discordant notes of the devil’s interval.

What no one noticed during the day was that the library was slowly emptying. Dust scattered the shelves like rotted teeth, rattling fear into the adjacent books as they wondered if they were next. The girl touched her fingers to the empty place in the shelf and felt the cold seeping up her arm and into her bones. The dust whispered an ominous tale of darkness, of an empty maw that ate and ate and was never full. The maw was loud compared to the silence of the library, chaos wreathed in shadow.

There had been a time when there were others like her, who listened long enough to hear the books. The world was different now. The creeping, pervading emptiness spoke a history of voice winds blown aside and word labyrinths left to tangle sentences and letters into nonsensical utterances. The people who lived today had forgotten how to listen to the silence. They preferred the noise of the maw, the explosions of sound and the harsh, metallic notes of unabashed dissonance without realizing they were clenched tight in its jaws. And as the maw sunk its teeth deeper and deeper, the myriad worlds of galaxies and dreams contained in the books became quieter until the girl was the only one left who could hear them.

The girl cleaned the space of dust with her rag and rearranged the books until the darkness was swallowed. As she did so, the voices breathed a sigh of grief for the departed. She moved out of the aisles and retrieved a bottle of thick black ink from her supply cabinet. Tomorrow the children who visited the library would wonder about the new name on her forearm. They would whisper that it was her latest victim or deceased loved one. When she told them the story in the afternoon when the mill of visitors slowed down, they would think she had devised it all on her own. They wouldn’t remember the book that had occupied the shelf only yesterday or the adventures it contained. Its name was already lost inside the noise of the maw.

She turned to the mirror and scarred the name of the book into one of the few empty places on her flesh. She remembered for them, every name and symbol of the stories that had been lost etched into her skin so that the world couldn’t completely forget.

When she was done, she moaned her own chorus of grief into the library’s silence and sank into a chair, her limbs creaking like an unfurling scroll. She gazed out the window with her impossibly ancient eyes and saw her reflection distorted and stark against the darkness that had blanketed the outside world. She didn’t mind the loneliness of her work because she was never truly alone. She was nearly one of the books herself, a jumble of words that sang forgotten stories into the ever-lengthening night. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes to embrace the voices of the books she had tended for so long.

Tomorrow she would relate to the children the adventures of the book that had so recently been swallowed. She would tell them its name, of thieves who stole to feed the poor and a boy who lived in a magical land and never grew older. Most importantly, she would tell them about the silence. She would remind them that the louder the world was the more difficult it was to hear the symphony and that noise often masked the truth. As she fell asleep in her chair, her thoughts soared high and trill to mingle with the voices inside the library’s silence. She hoped that at least one of the children would understand what she related. She hoped that one child would grow up to listen to the library and tend to her books long after she was gone. She hoped that child would find their own voice in the silence and block out the cacophony of the maw to commune with the orchestra of voices waiting for each and every one of us if we listen closely enough.