Excerpt: Library

Everything was still dark when Liz arrived at the library. The exterior emergency power at the university didn’t come on until she was in the courtyard. There was a twenty-minute lag between when the battery-powered lights and the generators kicking on. The system was a dinosaur. Last year’s test led to replacing a few light bulbs rather than the entire setup.

As she got closer, she refocused her sight on the side of the building. A big section of stucco had fallen off, baring structure underneath.

Same thing had happened during the quake when she was a kid, but on the other side of the library. She stared upward. This side was stone underneath, not brick. It must have been renovated sometime during the last hundred years. The fact that anyone would build anything out of brick or stone in an earthquake area was completely absurd, but back then, they didn’t really have much else to work with.

She swallowed hard as she neared. Under a pile of flaked-off stucco, half of the front vestibule was collapsed and laying in a big heap. She didn’t want to think of the horrors beyond. It hurt too much. Her book babies were in there and they better be okay. She broke into a run.

After climbing the rubble, she made her way into what was left of the vestibule. One of the doors had fallen away with its wall. She gritted her teeth to hold back tears. How much damage could this place—her heaven—sustain before crumbling? With a heavy heart, she tossed aside a stone cherub from the previously gorgeous doorway.

The hole in the vestibule was big enough to crawl through. Hopefully the security people would get here soon and keep everyone else out. Hopefully. Very hopefully.

The Osric Collection was most important. The basement automated system would probably be okay, but the Osric Collection in the Archive Room had better still be intact. None of it could be replaced. So much history could be lost forever.

The super-old, fragile first editions and illuminated manuscripts had been donated by the Osric family when the university was built and every other year more were added. They were a vast wealth of information from the medieval period through the Victorian era.

Legend had it that they were rescued from a big fire in the old library after the huge San Francisco quake in 1906. They’d also survived the flood. But the flood wasn’t as legendary as what this quake had done.

The building wasn’t burning and for that, she was quite relieved. But things were still pretty bad. As she crossed the first floor, there was hardly a book on a shelf anywhere. Some of the shelving units had toppled, their “earthquake proofing” brackets twisted and gnarled. Emergency battery-powered lights were very dim. Some had already gone out.

She shined her flashlight toward the back. The door to the Osric Collection was hanging open, crookedly wedged against the floor.

And there was more rubble spilling through it.

No. No. Liz hurried, jumping over books and desks. What the hell had happened in there?

As she approached, the faint sound of scraping also spilled out with the chunks of plaster and wood.

What the hell was happening in there?

Liz jogged the rest of the way over more books, office supplies and computers. Upon entering, she heard footsteps running deeper into the room and anger flooded through her. Someone had illegally invaded her space. By the time she aimed her flashlight, the footsteps had disappeared through a gaping hole in the outside wall.

A stone wall.

Using her flashlight, she traced the stone from the hole over to a section she’d never seen before. Just yesterday, inside the door, there was a plain white wall to the left with a photo of Kyre Osric when he donated an early copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Now, there was a twisted pile of lath, brick and plaster.

And above that, there was a small cutout in the stone. Like someone had built a boxy shelf directly into the wall.

Heart pounding, Liz approached cautiously. Why the hell hadn’t security kept out whoever had been in here? Why the hell hadn’t she gotten here sooner to keep out whoever had been in here? Dammit.

On the back of the cubbyhole, partly scraped away, was an inscription. It was hard to make out, but it looked something like, This B_k is protected. R__m__al is str___ly Fo____den and w___ brin_ Gre__t Woe._

After laying down the flashlight, she sat down on the edge of the pile and traced what was left of the letters with her fingertips. This had to be the strangest thing she’d ever seen in the library, and definitely the most intriguing.

She said the words aloud as her fingers helped decipher them. “This Book is protected. Removal is strictly Forbidden and will bring Great Woe.” Leaning back, unsure what to make of anything anymore, she felt something pushing against her ass. Standing, she reached back figuring it was the jagged edge of a rock, but then remembered the cell phone in her back pocket.

And it had a camera. She scrambled it out and snapped pictures of the cutout, the inscription, the wall, and all the plaster, brick, wood and stone. Hopefully the pics would show all the detail. The room was awfully dark and her camera phone didn’t have a flash.

In her flashlight’s beam, near the front of the cubbyhole, Liz noticed a piece of what looked to be leather. Re-pocketing her phone, she knelt and picked up the scrap to examine it more closely. There was just enough juice in the flashlight’s batteries to see an old, dirty, gold leaf design glint on the leather. “Ward Family…” And it was embossed in the same fashion as the medieval, jewel-encrusted Latin bibles.

The strip looked as though it had been ripped away recently. The tear was fresh, light in color and jagged.

Could whoever had run out the hole in the wall have ripped off this bit of leather, scraped at the stone and made off with some old book? A book with Tayna’s last name on it, no less. Something had the hair on the back of Liz’s neck standing on end.

“What have we here?” Chancellor Higgins’s voice made Liz jump up to standing, dropping the leather and the flashlight. A troop of security officers filtered into the room. “Liz. You’re a little early for work.”

She hurriedly picked up the things she’d dropped. “Yes, sir. I wanted to make sure everything was okay and clearly it isn’t. And in more ways than just half the building falling down.” She hid the scrap of leather in her hand as she casually placed it in her pocket.

When the chancellor saw the cutout in the wall, he pretty much forgot about Liz as he inspected the area with his high-wattage flashlight. She stood there, wanting to bolt to Tayna’s before he started asking questions she couldn’t answer. Or worse yet, became a suspect in the case of the missing book.

“This building is not safe right now. Why don’t you come back later when we can secure it enough to start picking up all the books?” The chancellor didn’t look back at her.

She took the hint, glad she wasn’t a suspect, and hurried out of the library. There was no good reason for a book with Tayna’s family name to be walled up and forgotten in the library when her house was just a stone’s throw away. And that damn cheesy inscription made this whole thing seem like some kind of spark that’d set off a medieval witch hunt. It just didn’t feel good, either.

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Excerpt: Library — Dinner
Deleted: Scene Two — Chapter Ten Opening