The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,103

It’d been a trick of imagination, wishful thinking. He couldn’t start dredging up ghosts now, or he’d never get out of here.

Hero cleared his throat again. “Once upon a time there was a man . . .”

It was a story. It wasn’t his author’s story, not even his book’s story; he couldn’t even remember how that started anymore, but maybe this was more important: it was his story.

“Once upon a time there was a man who made very bad mistakes. No, that’s not right. He made very bad decisions. And so was a very bad man.”

A rise of crumpled hides dropped off to a slick descent of scrolls that Hero had to navigate on his hands and knees. He half slid, half fell to the bottom, bringing half a dozen scrolls down with him and a scattered shower of papyrus flakes. When he managed to unbury himself, he realized he’d slid to the foot of a clearing, bordered on all sides by massive, cresting waves of forgotten books. It would be a long, fruitless struggle up in any direction. As if Hero even had a direction. Shadows played at the tops, fluttering between drifts of hypertext fragments like blackbirds. It gave him the feeling of a hundred eyes, being watched. Or perhaps, being listened to.

The weight of it caught up with him. Hero sighed and sagged down onto a rubble of tablets.

“Bad men are not wrong, you see. But simply bad, bad at being an expected kind of man. Bad at playing their role in stories. So this man had a thought to change the story, for he was also a very foolish man.”

The dark was descending now. Like ink seeping across paper. The illusion dragged the memory out of him, the ink rotting across his pages and the way Claire’s face turned to him etched with horror. The shadows were drifting down the rubble, swaying and coalescing with the glowing dust to take spindly, drawn-out shapes. Hero shook his head and closed his eyes, as if that had ever worked to make phantoms go away.

“He set out to change the story, but that’s not how stories work. He changed instead. Entirely by accident, and not always for the better. And it came to pass that this very bad, very foolish man wasn’t quite sure what kind of man he was anymore.”

A breath of sound fluttered around him again. It was airy, but not quite a sigh. More like an intake of breath. A scroll shifted against the toe of his boot, and when Hero opened his eyes it was his breath that snagged. Half a dozen figures stood at the base of the cliff. “Figures” was the only term to use, because there was nothing else definable about them. Their faces lacked the definition of skulls, their lips no more than a faded smudge of ink. Crumpled shadows where their eyes should have been. Their spindly legs faded out to nothing just above the dust-creased paper. Figures, gone fuzzy with no one to clearly hold them in their mind’s eye. Stories, lost with no one to read them.

They didn’t move, and neither did Hero. When he was able to breathe again, it wasn’t fear that swept over him, but sympathy. A deep, infinite sadness at the loss and the slow kind of death that awaited him, and all books, here.

“And with no one to tell him otherwise, he clung to his story,” Hero said in a whisper. “Because story was all he thought he had. And that’s how . . . how he got lost. Somewhere along the way of searching for a story, he’d wandered off the path and into the dark woods. And he discovered perhaps what he had wanted wasn’t a story at all.”

More figures multiplied out of the drifts, creating a slowly shrinking ring around him. They drew close enough that Hero’s voice took on a confessional nature by necessity. He studied the torn pages at his feet and wrapped his arms around himself, tight. He barely noticed the square press of his book into his ribs anymore. He’d wandered so far off the page.

“A very bad man had made mistakes, and bad choices, but they’d led him into a life. And a life, while also a story, is also something quite different.”

The light grew until it was almost a half twilight, glowing dust collected and limning the silent audience around him. A shiver, more of a bare impression of fingertips than an actual hand,