scope, then settled in her seat and rested her head on the shoulder of the man, cosying up and getting comfortable for the long flight to Turkey.
91
Athanasius and Father Thomas reached the top of the stairs and stopped, listening to the still darkness of the upper mountain chambers. By the time Athanasius had retrieved torches and the key to the staircase Malachi had a five-minute head start on them.
‘He’ll get to the library long before we will,’ Thomas said through grabbed breaths, ‘then he’ll lock the reading room door behind him.’
Athanasius nodded. ‘We should make for the main entrance, it’s nearer. How quickly do you think you can break in?’
‘If we’re not worried about tripping any alarms it will be easy.’
‘I think the time for stealth has passed,’ Athanasius said, and started to descend.
It took them ten long minutes to snake down the stairs and reach the library. Athanasius leaned against the wall, relishing the cold of the rock as Thomas prised the hand scanner off the wall with his pocket-knife, bared two wires and touched them together.
The door slid open with a hiss and a puff of air showing that the positive pressure within the climate controlled library was still active. It was designed to keep mould spores and other undesirables out of the air surrounding the priceless collection of texts. It would also be an effective way of slowing the penetration of the airborne infection into the library. Malachi was clearly being selective about exactly which parts of modernity he was turning his back on.
Thomas stepped forward and looked up, bracing himself for the shriek of the intruder alarm. ‘He must have de-activated the motion sensors,’ Thomas said when none came. ‘That’s why the lights are not working.’
Athanasius moved past him heading into the main collection. It was a strange experience, moving through the library without the usual glow of a follow light. The sweep of their torch beams revealed much more than he had ever seen before. The follow lights usually only allowed one to glimpse isolated parts, so seeing it in its vast entirety like this, the vast bookcases filled with every great thought mankind had ever had, made him profoundly sad: it was like finding a whale kept captive in a tank when it was used to having the whole ocean to roam in.
‘Reading rooms,’ Thomas said, shining his torch over to a set of doors up ahead. Athanasius reached the door to the reading room of the Sancti and twisted the handle. ‘Locked. Do you think he’s passed through already?’
Something clattered to the floor in the distance giving them their answer and they hurried after it. The noises continued as they made their way through the library. It sounded like some great creature was lumbering through the dark, bumping into everything as it made its way. They passed into the next chamber and discovered the cause of the noise. There were books everywhere, swept from the shelves by the armful onto the floor. It was like a horde of vandals had ransacked the place, pulling everything from the shelves and shredding the pages.
‘Why is he doing this?’ Thomas surveyed the devastation as they moved through it. ‘No one loves the library more than Malachi. It makes no sense for him to do this.’
‘I don’t think he is in full possession of his senses. I think his world has fallen apart and this is a manifestation of it.’
They rounded a corner and saw light up ahead, coming from inside the Crypto Revelatio.
‘Malachi!’ Athanasius called out. ‘We just want to talk.’ He switched off his torch and inched down the corridor towards the light, the room beyond the arch coming gradually into view. It was in even greater chaos than the rest of the library with books and piles of paper spilling out of the door into the corridor. ‘There’s only one way out of there, Malachi. It’s a dead-end. If you don’t come out then we will come in.’
‘Stay back,’ Malachi’s voice boomed from the chamber.
‘We’re just here to talk. We want to help you but we need to understand what you read in the Starmap that has made you do this to your beloved library, and try and take a man’s life?’
‘That is no man.’
Athanasius glanced over at Thomas who was inching his way forward along the other side of the tunnel. ‘For mercy’s sake, Malachi, tell us what you read.’
‘It doesn’t matter, it’s too late anyway. You should have let me kill it