Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,17
her son followed a few steps behind.
When he’d finished replacing the last of his misplaced inventory, he turned and clapped his hands together in a well-practiced but utterly fake show of considerate customer service. “Now then, what’s the name of the book?”
“It’s a medical book called ‘Cutaneous Scarring: A Clinical Methodology.’” She smiled sheepishly at the lengthy title. “Do you think you might have it? I know it’s a longshot but I already checked the library at the medical school, and they said I’d probably have to get it online but to check with you first because you actually have a pretty good sized medical section… for a private library, that is.” Another nervous smile.
But Randall nodded as he led the way to the library’s computers. “We do have a comparatively large selection as a matter of fact, as many of the school’s medical students live in an apartment complex along the same bus route.” The only section larger in the library was the art section. Most of that was his personal collection, however.
Randall stopped and typed the name of the book she was looking for into the database’s search field on the nearest PC.
He already knew he didn’t have that particular book. If he did, he would have remembered it because he would have read it. He had read all of the medical books in the library. But people didn’t appreciate answers that appeared like guesses when it came to something they felt desperately about. They wanted cold, hard evidence that you were doing all you could to help them. Even though he knew the book wasn’t in the library, he went through the motions of a search anyway. Which of course came up empty.
“I’m afraid it’s as I suspected,” he said shaking his head and gesturing to the screen. “That edition is out of print and not currently on the shelves, but I can certainly have it special ordered for you if you’d like—”
He never finished his sentence. The world warped around him on a shockwave of sorts and the air became monstrous in that moment. It ate up his words, sucking them free of his mouth and lungs before they had a chance to be heard. At the same time, wood from the French double doors at the front of the library imploded to become splinters of all sizes that shot through the room like a thousand spears.
Inaudible over the deafening blast, the stained glass along the top of all four walls of the large room shattered noiselessly into dust. All around Randall, the library transformed into a sudden mish-mash of every color and shape, so destroyed in its mixing it was reminiscent of ash-brown paint.
There may have been screams; he would never know. He had the sudden sensation of falling. The woman and child that had been standing beside him became figments of the past, no longer of absolute importance. He couldn’t tell what was up or down; there was no sensation but that of a slight pull on his body and the distant, thankfully numb thunking of objects banging into him.
In short order, everything went black… which then faded into white.
The white had a miasma of rainbow colors interwoven throughout its fabric. At the same time, it wasn’t there. There was no white, there was no rainbow, there was nothing. Except music? In the background of the white, miasmic nothing, a song played. Au Claire de la Lune. It was an old French folk song, one he somehow remembered now, soft and echoing on an unseen piano.
It was the song sung by the first human voice ever recorded. Randall had a copy of the recording from 1860 in the art section of his library. Now he floated, recalling the words even though he had no physical body and therefore no brain with which to recall them. He sang wordlessly despite the impossible-ness of it, a whisper of a thought that sounded clearly in the multi-hued nothingness…
"Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi ta lume pour écrire un mot. Ma chandelle est morte, je n'ai plus de feu. Ouvre-moi ta porte pour l'amour de Dieu.”
“By the light of the moon, my friend Pierrot, lend me a light so I can continue to write? My own light has gone out… I have no fire…. Open the door, for the love of God.”
My light has gone out. I have no fire. Open the door.