The Gathering

The Grand Library

XII. The Grand Library

Kash Myra had always trusted her instincts.

Not the vague, mystical "intuition" people talked about in self-help books: real instincts, the kind you developed when survival wasn't guaranteed. The kind that told you which streets to avoid, which strangers to trust, which doors led to safety and which led to something worse.

Right now, her instincts were telling her she'd made a mistake.

The industrial district of Arkham sprawled along the river's edge like a rusting skeleton. The air smelled of rust and river water. Abandoned warehouses, chain-link fences topped with razor wire, loading docks that hadn't seen trucks in decades. The bartender at O'Malley's, a grizzled man with knowing eyes, had warned her.

"Don't go past the old cannery," he'd said. "There can be things there, you see. Things that don't like being looked at."

Kash had smiled, finished her sandwich, and gone anyway. She had a camera. She had questions. And she had thirty years of learning that warnings usually came from people who'd never actually faced the things they feared.

Now, standing in the shadow of a collapsed grain silo, she was reconsidering.

The city fascinated her. Every corner triggered something: not memories exactly, but the ghosts of memories. Shapes that felt familiar. Angles that reminded her of places she might have been, in the life before she'd built herself into Kash Myra. She'd been photographing everything: the rust patterns on abandoned machinery, the way the afternoon light fell through broken windows, the graffiti tags that formed words in languages she couldn't quite read.

The Polaroid was heavy around her neck. Reassuring. Each photo was evidence. Each click of the shutter was a small act of control.

She was framing a shot of a collapsed water tower, sweat cooling on her neck, when she heard the growling.

Low. Sustained. Coming from somewhere ahead.

Kash lowered the camera slowly.

Three dogs emerged from behind a corner, perhaps five hundred feet away. Strays, but not the desperate, skinny strays you saw in most cities. These were thick-bodied, well-fed, moving with the coordinated purpose of a hunting pack. Their eyes caught the late afternoon light and reflected it wrong.

No one around. No buildings with accessible doors, at least not in front of her. Behind her, maybe, she'd passed some structures that looked marginally less abandoned.

The dogs walked toward her. Not running. Walking. As if they knew she had nowhere to go.

Kash wasn't terrified. Terror was for people who hadn't learned to think through fear. She was calculating.

The Polaroid.

She raised the camera, aimed at the pack, and pressed the shutter.

The flash exploded in the dimming light: bright, sudden, blinding. The dogs yelped, stumbling, pawing at their eyes. Two of them collided with each other.

Kash ran.

Not away from the dogs: toward the buildings she remembered passing. A chain-link fence with a gap at the bottom. A fire escape with a lowered ladder. A loading dock with crates stacked high enough to climb. She'd mapped the terrain unconsciously, the way she always did, and now that map was saving her life.

The dogs recovered faster than she'd hoped. She could hear them behind her: not growling now, just the rapid scratch of claws on cracked pavement, the heavy panting of the chase.

Fence. Gap. Through.

She slid under the chain-link, feeling it scrape her back, and came up running. The dogs hit the fence a second later, snarling, but they were too big for the gap. They'd find another way around. She had maybe thirty seconds.

Fire escape. Ladder.

She jumped, grabbed the bottom rung. The metal was hot from afternoon sun. She pulled herself up. Her arms burned. Her lungs burned. But she climbed, one rung after another, until she was on the first landing.

Below, the dogs had found a hole in the fence. They were through. They were circling the base of the fire escape, looking up at her with those wrong-reflecting eyes.

The ladder was too high for them to jump. She was safe.

For now.

"Well," she said aloud, her voice steadier than she felt. "This is a problem."

The dogs didn't respond. They just watched. Waiting.

Kash pulled out the Polaroid she'd taken and watched it develop. Three shapes, caught mid-blur, their eyes twin points of light. Evidence. Documentation. Proof that this had happened, even if no one believed her.

She was considering her options: wait for the dogs to lose interest, try to reach the roof, call for help on a phone that had no signal; when she heard something else.

Singing.

Four voices, male, in close harmony. The melody was African, Southern African, she thought, though she couldn't place the tradition. It rose from somewhere nearby, resonant and strange, coming from the buildings themselves.

The dogs' heads snapped toward the sound. Their posture changed from hunting alertness to something like confusion. One of them whined.

The singing grew louder. Kash felt it in her chest, in her bones, a vibration that was physical. The harmony was impossible: four distinct voices, weaving around each other, yet coming from a single source.

The dogs broke and ran. Not toward the sound, not away from it, just away, as if the singing had reminded them of somewhere else they needed to be.

Kash watched them go.

The singing stopped.

Below her, a door opened in the warehouse across the alley: a door she would have sworn was rusted shut, in a building she would have sworn was abandoned.

A man stepped out.

He was tall, dressed in clothing that might have been academic casual or might have been spiritual vestment: a loose tunic over simple trousers, colors muted, the ambiguity intentional. His face was calm, his posture relaxed, as if he'd just finished a pleasant stroll rather than whatever that singing had been.

"In here, Miss," he said. His voice was low, pleasant, unhurried. "It's safe here."

Kash's empathy, the sense she'd developed over years of reading people, of knowing who to trust, reached toward him automatically.

No deception. No threat. Only a deep, patient calm, and beneath it, something vast, like looking at the surface of a deep lake.

He was like her. Not the same, but like her. Displaced. Out of sequence. Wrong in a way that felt familiar.

She climbed down the fire escape.

The man held the door open, hands at rest at his sides. She stepped through.

And stopped.

They were in a library. The air was ten degrees cooler.

Not a warehouse. Not an abandoned industrial building. A library: vast, domed, lined with shelves that rose toward a ceiling painted with constellations she didn't recognize. Chandeliers hung at intervals, their lights dim but steady, casting pools of amber illumination across reading tables and leather chairs. The air smelled of old paper and older secrets: dust, leather binding, the mineral tang of ancient ink.

Kash set her camera down on a reading table.

"How the..." Her voice refused to cooperate. She swallowed, tried again. "Where...?"

"The Grand Library of the Historical Society, Miss." The man offered a slight bow. "I am Kamadan. Kamaskera Kamadan, if you prefer the full form. And you are Kash Myra."

"How do you know my name?"

"I have been receiving notifications. About people like us. People who crossed thresholds and stayed too long." He studied her with dark, thoughtful eyes. "You arrived last night, I think. Through a displacement you didn't choose. Now you're trying to understand where you are and why."

Kash stared at him.

"You're one of us," she said slowly. "One of the threshold people."

"An adequate term." Kamadan reached into his tunic and withdrew a piece of paper: old, yellowed, the edges soft with age. "Something tells me you have something like this."

Kash reached into her belt bag. Her fingers found paper she didn't remember putting there.

She drew it out.

Same handwriting. Same yellowed edges. An address, and below it, four words:

You know the code.

"That's impossible," she said. "I checked this bag an hour ago. There was nothing..."

"The papers appear when they're needed. I've stopped questioning the mechanism." Kamadan tucked his own paper away. "I have some books to return, materials I was studying before your arrival interrupted my research. Then, if you're willing, we can investigate this address together. Unless you object."

"Object?" Kash laughed: a short, incredulous sound. "I was just chased by dogs that shouldn't exist, rescued by a man who sings with four voices, and I'm standing in a library that was definitely a warehouse thirty seconds ago. Objecting seems beside the point."

"A practical perspective. I appreciate practicality." Kamadan moved toward one of the reading tables, where several large volumes lay open. "The dogs, by the way, are not strays. They are guardians; or were, once. Something has been agitating them recently. Drawing them toward certain areas. I suspect our arrival is connected."

"Our arrival?"

"Yours. Mine. The others." He began closing the books, handling them with careful reverence. Leather bindings, pages heavy with age. "There are more of us, Miss Myra. I've been tracking them through the notifications. Two women who look like twins but aren't. A woman who walks through mirrors. A woman who speaks to machines." He paused. "And you. The one who rebuilt herself from nothing."

Kash felt a chill that had nothing to do with the library's temperature.

"How do you know that?"

"I know many things. Photographic memory. Every text, every image, every experience remains accessible." He tapped his temple. "But I also received notifications specifically about you. 'The constructed one approaches. Her empathy will be essential.' I confess I didn't understand the reference until I felt your presence outside."

"You felt me?"

"The singing. It's not just music, it's a form of perception. My predecessors taught me to listen through the harmonics." He gathered the books into a neat stack. "You were afraid but not panicked. Calculating rather than fleeing blindly. And your emotional signature was distinctive. Layered. As if you had built yourself deliberately, piece by piece."

"That's exactly what I did."

"I know." He lifted the books. "The return desk is this way. We should hurry. The library doesn't appreciate visitors who overstay."