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Mr. Linden’s Library

A Short Story

By

Tattoo Alchemist

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”

H.P. Lovecraft

“The Call of the Cthulhu”

* * *

Mystics and new age people would call Paul Lindin an “old soul”. Even though he was only thirty-eight, he had acquired the knowledge and wisdom of an old man in the body of a young one with all the books in his library. He always loved to say that his library was like a great cathedral and every book is a finely made brick.

It was one of those “finely made bricks” that had brought Alice Linae to his front doorstep one warm June day.

She rang the doorbell.

A few seconds later a voice on an intercom speaker right above the doorbell called out:

“Hello?” A gentle voice asked, “Who comes knocking?”

It was such an odd type greeting to Alice that she hesitated at first when she spoke up, “It’s…Alice Linae. I was referred to you by my professor Elizabeth Short.”

“Ah yes! Liz told me you’d be coming today, but first, three questions.”

This must be the voice of Paul Linden, Alice thought. She’d been warned by her professor that Mr. Linden was an eccentric man. Playing along she stated boldly:

“Ask the questions, I am not afraid”

“Tea or coffee?” The voice asked

Alice already knew how to answer that question. It was the drink of choice for any intellectual.

“Tea.” She answered proudly.

“Good answer” the voice of Mr. Linden answered giving away the smile that he had at the other end, “Now, would you like milk or lemon?”

The answer was something she already knew.

“That depends on the tea” She said.

“Sharp as a tack you are” Mr. Linden complemented, “the final question; what is your favorite color?”

Alice couldn’t help but give a sharp laugh at the question

“Blue” she answered honestly.

“You may now enter” Mr. Linden said as the locks on the front door clicked open.

Alice reached out to the ornate brass handle, opened the door, and stepped in. She closed the door behind her and began to take in the modest mansion that was Mr. Linden’s home. The foyer didn’t seem to be anything that special with a coat closet to one side, the stairs slightly to the right, a door next to the stairs, a door to her front and a door to her side.

The door to her front began to open and out came a rather tall and lanky man with black rimmed glasses with rectangular lenses like microscope slides that had the sharp corners that had been made into gentle curves. He had eyes that were like a pair of jade jewels given to a mortal man and his hair though brown was already starting to show signs of gray at the areas above his ears and above his brow. There was no doubt in Alice’s mind that this was Paul Linden.

“Come in please” Mr. Linden smiled, waving his hand for her to come in.

Alice was floored by the sight that she had seen that was Mr. Linden’s Library.

It was the type of library of a man who had a small fortune: real oak for the paneling and for the bookshelves that lined the large octagonal room. The bookshelves must have gone up at least ten or twelve feet high with a ladder on rollers that went all around the perimeter of the library. In an irregular circle were couches and chairs of such luxury that if Alice were to sit in one of them she could have fallen asleep in its soft arms and lap. The tables were just as luxurious with their ornate legs with little vines and leaves frozen into the wood. In the tabletops, she saw some that had diamond patterns, rectangular patters, and even a round coffee shaped table in the form of yin and yang, a light wood for one and a dark wood for the other. Below them there was a beautiful red ornate rug that stretched out like the banner of some great army.

Then there were the books, rows upon rows of books in all directions. It seemed in comprehensible that Mr. Linden could have read them all in his short thirty-eight years, but there they were. At the distance that Alice was at, she couldn’t discern all the titles all she could do was take in the spectacular view of it all, but that was when her attention was brought upward by the chandelier that cast out a soft yellow glow.

Across the ceiling, it could only be described as like a chapel, only when Alice looked closer; she saw scenes from famous books. Even though so many demanded attention, there was one that she couldn’t help but be drawn to. It was a scene from “Alice in Wonderland” where the curious girl Alice was taking to the Caterpillar on the mushroom while he was smoking his hookah.

Keeping her eyes on that one mural she lost her sense of balance and bumped into one of the couches. Quickly regaining her balance, she looked over to Mr. Linden who was at the ladder reaching up to one of the higher bookshelves.

“Careful, my dear” Mr. Linden smiled, “If you stare at the ceiling too long you forget where you’re standing.”

“It’s beautiful” Alice awed at the sight of everything in the room, “How did you manage this?”

Mr. Linden chuckled, “Wealth is a hard thing to get rid of.” He grabbed the book he was looking for off the shelf and descended down the ladder. “My great grandfather was a railroad tycoon, my grandfather invested in airplanes, and my father invested in computers. Whilst I simply became a lover of books and that’s what I do most of my time; I read and I write.”

“But this house” She trailed off trying to verbally put a coherent sentence together.

Mr. Linden approached, “Yes, as I said wealth is a hard thing to get rid of. So with the family fortune carefully invested, I simply built my own little habitat. My own Hobbit hole.”

Alice smiled at the phrase and finished it with, “And that means comfort.”

Mr. Linden smiled even more, “I like you more and more, Miss Linae, Liz did tell me that you were her prodigal student as well as a renegade.”

Alice never thought of herself as either, but rather just one who was passionate about what she was studying, which was literature and writing. Still, hearing the phrase “renegade” made her ask:

“How am I a renegade?”

“She tells me that you like to read.” Mr. Linden began.

“Yes, I do.” Alice said proudly

“But she says that most of what you read is not on the syllabus.”

“I just prefer to read what I like.” Alice said defensively but as she thought about her professor and all the books she was forced to read, she couldn’t help but voice her opinion about it. “It’s Professor Short that makes me read all this crap about supposed fiction disguised as real life.”

“That’s what she told me along with the fact that you prefer to do things your own way rather than follow the rules.”

Alice quipped, “Rules are made to be broken.”

“Maybe so” Mr. Linden said, setting his books down on the nearest table, but he quipped, “But you still played the game at the front door.”

Alice was just as quick, “How else was I supposed to get in.”

Mr. Linden laughed, “Still just as sharp. Now for the tea.”

He exited through a door to the immediate left, leaving Alice alone to inspect the library. Taking a closer look at what was on the shelves, she found so many fiction writers from Dante to Stephen King. That already seemed to be odd to her since she figured that a man with such refined tastes as oak and fancy furniture would mostly stock up in classic authors like Robert Lewis Stevenson, Jane Austin, and Henry James with no room for contemporaries like Stephen King.

Scanning the shelves she came to a small case framed by a glass window with a small metal handle in front of it that made her think that it would open out and downward from the angle of the inside hinges. She stepped closer to the closed off shelf and looked inside. There were books that had that look of age to them, the faded bindings and the leathery coverings that were beginning to wear thin in some areas. Except there was one that caught her attention right away, it was a book with a black leather binding and a small piece of gold leaf on it in the shape of a vine with three budding leaves coming off of it. She knew about this book and it was the very thing that she came for.

“Everyone who comes here is always attracted to that shelf.”

The suddenness of Mr. Linden’s voice made Alice jump at least a few inches off the floor. She turned around sharply to see him holding a tray with tea cups, tea pot, and a small plate of chocolates. Alice laid her hand over her heart as she gasped quietly and allowed the shock to run its course.

“Sorry” Mr. Linden smiled as he set the tray down on a nearby table, “when you live alone as long as I have, you forget how to act around people.”

Regaining her composure she looked back at the closed off shelf and asked, “You say everyone is attracted to this shelf?”

“That’s right. It always seems that whenever something is forbidden it attracts everyone’s curiosity as to what it is.”

Alice couldn’t help but laugh at that notion, even after receiving such a shock from Mr. Linden’s quiet entry. He was right about how curiosity is always attracted to the forbidden.

“My curiosity is what gets me in trouble.” Alice stated

“Oh?” Mr. Linden asked, “Can you think of any particular event like that?”

“When I was a little girl, my mother told me not to stare into the sun.” Alice recalled, “I always wondered why I shouldn’t. So when I was eleven, I did.”

“Is that all?”

“No, I forced myself to stare even though my eyes were hurting so much, but I wanted to know so badly that even when my mother found me she tried to cover my eyes but I tried to move her hands away, because I felt that I was close to finding out something. And that is what kept me company while I was in the darkness of the eye bandages.”

“Certainly proves that people warn you of these things because there are very real dangers out there. Such as these books.”

Mr. Linden moved closer to the forbidden shelf.

“What makes them dangerous?” Alice asked feeling annoyed by Mr. Linden’s ambiguity.

“Have you ever read the Hobbit?” Mr. Linden asked

“What does that have to do anything?” Alice snapped, irritated at his roundabout explanation and his obscure reference.

“I’m making a point here, Miss Linae.” He stated sounding officious like a schoolteacher raising his voice at a student who was speaking out of turn. “Have you read The Hobbit?”

“Yes.” Alice answered, “A long time ago.”

“Did you imagine yourself trapped in the darkness of the Misty Mountains? With the creature Gollum somewhere out there and you’ve made a deal to battle with riddles?”

“Yes.”

“Were you frightened?”

“No, because it was just a book. I could’ve closed it anytime I wanted.”

“That’s just it.” Mr. Linden said raising his finger at Alice to accentuate his point, “It’s just a made-up story from a vivid imagination. That’s what makes it safe. These books however are far more dangerous, because what they hold aren’t stories but knowledge. We both know that knowledge is power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Alice felt annoyed by the vagueness of Mr. Linden’s explanation, “How are they dangerous?”

Mr. Linden reached over to the forbidden shelf, opened the door, and took out one of the books. It was black leather with gold leaf on the cover in the form of an inverted pentacle star, the kind of star that most people would associate with Satanism.

“This is the Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows” Mr. Linden explained, “Written in the year 1666 by Aristide Torchia. The story goes that Torchia wrote this book in collaboration with a very notorious individual. This book, when used properly, can summon the Prince of Darkness himself and because of that, Torchia was burnt at the stake in 1667.”

Alice’s response was instant, “Nonsense, just like all religions.”

“Touché” Mr. Linden smiled as he put back the book into the shelf and took out a different one, “But this one, I know you’ve had your eye on.”

He pulled out the book that Alice was looking at; black leather binding and the shape of the vine with the three budding leaves. She looked closely at the cover and saw that the symbol on the cover was just like the one on the binding a vine with leaves. Looking at it was like looking at a diamond ring under a glass case, something about it made her want to reach out and take it from his very hand and keep it all to herself.

“This one is called The Garden of Eternal Spring” Mr. Linden explained, “It was written in the year 1779 by a Russian named Leo Trediak who was said to be a gardener, a scientist, and some say, a sorcerer. It is said that in this book he not only put in his knowledge about plants but also spells. I don’t know anything else about it. I haven’t dared to look into it myself because of what happened to the author and its owners.”

Alice already knew all of these facts, but she had to ask to keep up her façade, “What happened?”

“They were strangled.” Mr. Linden coldly answered, “By who or what, I don’t know. All I know is that when the book came to me, I decided to try to keep it safe.”

Upon saying that he put the book back into the forbidden shelf and closed the glass door. He moved back to the table where he had set down the tea. Picking up the pot, he began to pour out the brewed batch into the cups. Turning back with the full cups, he saw Alice was moving towards the door that led to the front foyer.

“I’d love to stay and have tea” She said rather quickly, “But I have to get going.”

She gave no further explanation as she left the library and Mr. Linden in a rather confused state. He set down the tea cups and turned back to the forbidden shelf and just as he had predicted, the book was gone.

* * *

Later that night at her small home adjacent to the college campus, Alice threw open the front door and slammed it shut behind her. She leaned against it, desperately trying to catch her breath. The disbelief that she had stolen the book, but under normal circumstances, she would have thought of it as unthinkable as well as undoable, but there was something about that forbidden book. She had first heard of it back in her first year of college when she was researching modern legends of dangerous books. The kind that becomes infamous from the day that they’re printed. The Garden of Eternal Spring was just such a book. She also knew that the current owner of the book was Paul Linden and it would have been too suspicious if she had gone up to the house just to “chat” about books with him. It was because of this fact that she had concocted the plan to find a way to be “brought” to Mr. Linden’s home and finally get the book. Thus she found out that her professor, Elizabeth Short, knew Paul Linden and that had put the final seal into her plan.

Her breath starting to calm down she thought back to that moment that she had laid eyes on the book in that closed off shelf. To her it was like a beautiful bird that deserved to be free and not just sit and rot on some shelf. At least that’s what she tried to convince herself of but the fact was that she had a burning desire to have it. She didn’t just want it; she had to have it.

Pulling the book out from under her shirt, she held it in her sweaty hands and gazed at its black leather cover. She did nothing else; she didn’t take her coat off or get a get a drink to wet her dry throat. She simply set herself down at the nearest possible seat and began to read the book.

The ornate decorations of the book lived up to its title of The Garden of Eternal Spring. The letters of the book weren’t written in the normal black ink, they were green. The edging of some of the pages had vines growing up the side to accent its beauty.

In reading the book, time became like salt-water taffy when the minutes stretched on and on into an hour and the hour turned to hours from the afternoon to the darkening night sky.

Alice had already finished half of the book when she looked up at the clock and saw that it was already half-past midnight. She exhaled thinking that it was a good thing that it was a weekend otherwise she’d be in trouble for time in getting to those early morning classes.

The book still in hand, she headed to her small bedroom, slipped into her satin nightgown, set the book on the nightstand, and crawled into bed. Normally, she would have turned off the light and gone to bed, but she was half-way through the book and she figured that if she finished it tonight she could return it to Mr. Linden in the morning. Maybe if she explained how much she wanted to know what the book was about he’d understand.

“Yeah” she thought “If I tell him how much I wanted to know about it, I’m sure that he’ll understand.”

Turning the light back on, she threw back the sheets and began to read again. Once again, time began to stretch on and on and on. Until at one point Alice had trouble keeping her eyes open, the words seemed to garble together like letters in alpha-bits cereal, blurring and contrasting against the milky-white surface of the paper. She set herself on her left side, looking towards the light, the book still open, and she fell asleep.

As Alice slept, there was something stirring within the open book.

If one were to have looked at it at first it would have looked like the wind fluttering the pages, but unlike the wind that died down after a few minutes it kept coming and coming like rolling thunderclouds. It was just like the symbol on the cover, it was a vine, vines upon vines like ivy that were growing faster and faster out of the binding and pages of the very book as if it were the richest soil on earth. The stalk of the vines inching out like green fingers while the leaves were multiplying within the books binding while Alice Linae still lay fast asleep.

The thick green fingers soon covered the entire bed like a leafy bed sheet and it already covered up all of Alice’s body until she was buried underneath the devilish vegetation.

Mr. Linden was right that some books were dangerous.

He had warned her about the book.

Now it was too late.