She had adopted a mom’s voice, and they both heard her do it. Jackie gave one last look to where the noise had come from, which, as far as she could tell, was the magazine room in the complete opposite corner of the library. The angle was such that she couldn’t see into the room. She might have been able to see the shadow jutting out on the floor from its doorway, but she didn’t want to see that so her brain skimmed past it.
One aisle over, Jackie found the archives of the Daily Journal, back when it had had physical form. She started flipping through the binders of old issues. A microfiche system had been deemed too expensive by city government, and anyway would likely just have been ruined by librarian fluids or the blood of one of their victims.
“King City has to have come up at some point.”
“Mmm,” Diane said.
She wasn’t listening because she had found something she’d missed earlier. Stuck to the back of the aura report was an old photo. She couldn’t tell how old, because it was stuck image-side down. She picked at the edges of it, trying to get it to come off, but the photo was stuck firm.
“Dammit,” Jackie said, not in response to anything but just to have something to say as she searched, tediously, for information that might or might not exist.
Diane yanked at the photo, and it came unstuck with a pop. She turned it faceup. It was a photo from the era where people are stiffly arranged through the long minutes it took to register their image on chemical paper. She considered it as carefully and rationally as she could before coming to the verbal conclusion: “Oh, shit.”
“Why ‘oh, shit’?” Jackie popped her head up from behind a binder.
Diane held up the photo, and Jackie studied it closely, bringing her face in toward the flat faces looking back from long ago.
“Oh shit,” Jackie said.
“Yeah.”
“Well, my news isn’t great either.”
Jackie held up an index card that said, in neat block letters,
ALL MATERIALS ON KING CITY HAVE BEEN CATALOGUED
UNDER GEOGRAPHY, FORBIDDEN.
And then another sentence that had been blacked out with a scribbled marker, so much so that the black ink leaked through to the other side of the card.
Diane nodded, unsurprised. It had seemed too easy up to that point, and so she had been expecting something like this.
“The forbidden materials shelf is just past the biography section, near fiction.”
She pointed. The area where she pointed was as far from them as the entrance, in the opposite direction. There would be no escape if they were noticed. They both considered this. Jackie sat down on institutionally patterned carpet, her head in her hands, and allowed herself a few seconds of self-pity. Then she stood up, her eyes steady on her destination.
“Listen, Diane,” she said softly, clearly. “It made sense for us to do this together because we both need something. But you can go now. You’ve found…” She looked again at the photograph in Diane’s hand and shuddered. “Anyway, you have a son who needs you. You have to go home to him. I can do this.”
Diane thought about Josh, and she wanted to agree. The important thing was to get out of the library to her family, her sullen, solitary, teenage family. And so she felt furious about what she was going to say next.
“No. We came into the library together, we’ll leave it together.”
“Diane, you don’t have—”
“Jackie, if I left you here and you died, I would feel bad about it. I’d probably feel bad about it for the rest of my life. And I don’t like to feel bad. So let’s go.”
Jackie smiled. She didn’t mean much by it, but she meant some by it. Diane smiled back, meaning mostly the same.
She looked at Troy’s useless file and shrugged, deciding to take it with her. There wasn’t much to it, and they had come this far. She tucked it under one arm.
They started out for the forbidden shelf, past the biography section and, terrifyingly, the fiction section near it.
Nothing attracts a librarian more than fiction, as even the smallest child of Night Vale knows.
“I hope there is anything there about King City,” Jackie said.
“BRRGGHHHHH,” the fountain said.
This time there was definitely another noise along with it. Like a laugh but angry. Like crying but aggressive. Like a claw or a tail or a wing moving against bookshelves.
Diane and Jackie didn’t hear it, although there was nothing they could have done differently if they had.
THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE
CECIL:… or anyway, all of them that had survived. And that is why police and emergency medical crews no longer feel obligated to search for remains in any public library.
We are getting confirmation from several concerned citizens that something is very wrong with those cute plastic flamingos everyone bought from Lenny’s Bargain House. Those who get too close to the flamingos or, worse, touch them, are disappearing. Some of these unfortunates appeared again just moments later, sagging into shriveled skin with long gray hair, as though a lifetime had passed.
“Oh, I’m back! I’m back!” those people all said. “I thought I’d never see this place again.”
When asked where they had gone, many promptly died of old age.
Others have not reappeared at all.
Even those who were lucky enough not to disappear still reported odd side effects of the flamingos.
“Yeah, I touched one,” said Sheila, the woman who always marks people’s activities down on her clipboard at the Moonlite All-Nite. “And the world shown clear for the first time in my life. Like I had never seen any of it before. I had never seen any of it before, and I understood none of it. Which is when I realized that I had become myself as a baby again. I lived my entire life over again, making the same choices, surviving the same tragedy and surviving the same joy, and going through all the same mistakes, unable to stop myself, until I reached the moment again where I touched the flamingo, and then I was an infant again. I have gone through this loop hundreds of times. My life, which once seemed like an organic movement, now has become a hideous script that I must play out, with an ending that is forever forestalled. I won’t ever die, but I won’t ever live. Please help.”
And then, weeping, she touched the flamingo again.
There have also been some complaints that the plastic on the flamingos is cheaply produced and warped. Has Lenny’s Bargain House been selling us substandard and possibly time-bending decorative birds? We will investigate at some point in the future, when we feel like we are maybe more interested than we are now. Until then, we will continue on in ignorance, happy as we ever were.
And now, we are pleased to present three commercial-free hours of advertisements.
Chapter 28
They ran past the nonfiction shelves, filled with informative books on every subject not currently outlawed by city government, or the Sheriff’s Secret Police, or the World Government. The shelves were mostly empty. They tried to keep their footfalls as soft as possible.
In Jackie’s case, this resulted in only her usual heavy-heeled thuds.
Gently. Silence over speed, Diane thought, glaring at the teenager’s back but not wanting to say it out loud.
Hurry the hell up, Jackie thought, as Diane lagged behind.
After nonfiction was science fiction. No one knows why science fiction is kept separately from the rest of the nonfiction. Tradition is a powerful thing. These shelves were much less censored than the main nonfiction section, since science fiction tended to be about day-to-day stuff that everyone already knew.