Sonja Nitschke

Part 1 Initial Draft Under the Cut (ie, unrevised, with all the faults listed above here)

Nikki thought that being a Librarian would be quite delightful and even dared to speculate that they were more prone to adventures than anybody else. Under that assumption, she strove to secure for herself a position in her local library (it had brick walls and a staircase that circled gently upwards).

Eventually she managed to succeed. It certainly wouldn’t have been her first choice, but she had her foot in the door and really that was quite impressive: she became a volunteer.

She stood in front of the Head Librarian –~~ a plummishly plump woman in frail spectacles –~~ and listened to her elaborate on her duties. At the end, the Head Librarian asked, “Any questions, Nikki?”

“Yes. What kind of adventures have you had?”

The Head Librarian burst out laughing and wiped her eyes with a white laced handkerchief. “My dear, whatever gave you that idea?”

Nikki gestured at the glass displays of old books that had funny letters and swords and other stuff of rather interesting heritage that the Librarians could only have gained by braving the jungles of Africa or the ruins of haunted castles. “Where’d you get all those then?”

“Well, it says where on the tags,” said the Head Librarian with a bemused smile on her face. “Didn’t you read them?”

Nikki hadn’t. The print was very small and if there was one thing Nikki most despised was fine print.

The Head Librarian took Nikki by the elbow and guided her to a display of Leonardo da Vinci’s works. “See this Mona Lisa?”

Nikki nodded.

“It’s a replica, the tag says so, see?”

Nikki nodded. They were lying of course. So modest of them. But she’d play the game if they really wanted her to. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

That had all happened some time ago. Now, Nikki was a few years older, and several years wiser. Of course they had been replicas and of course librarians didn’t have adventures. Why, the most adventurous thing the head librarian did was to have a little brandy with her holiday egg nog. Nikki was quite certain that Gretta, a severely thin clerk who loaned books out and made up library cards had no adventures at all.

In short, Nikki was sadly disillusioned as she helped Gretta put the books back in their proper order on the shelf and made sure everything was just as tidy as could be. Librarians were very tidy and fastidious, Nikki discovered.

Sometimes, when Gretta wasn’t around, she’d read a chapter or two of an interesting book about aliens on Mars or she’d secretly consume a volume about dragons.

In short, the only adventures she encountered in the library were in the books. Which was all very well in and of itself, but Nikki wasn’t a part of those novels and thus did not share in their adventures. Rather disappointing, really.

It was the sort of day where the sky was all grey and the clouds were cumulous ones that threatened to drench innocent people rushing below. Unsurprisingly, it was a Monday morning and Nikki would much rather have been reading in bed instead of climbing the stairs and walking through the library’s tall double glass doors.

As usual, Gretta had a cartload of books that Nikki was supposed to reshelf in the science fiction section. She had already read most of them, but paused to smile at the Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It had a scantily clad voluptuous maiden on the cover, in the strong arms of our hero. She opened the book to skim the beginning chapter, which was her way of saying “hello” to old friends.

Familiar words greeted her as Nikki began to read. She turned the page, and saw the words fall beneath her finger tips, letters and punctuation tumbling and spinning down a vast expanse of white.

Nikki frowned and flipped through the pages — all naked and bare, bereft of words. They were gone. The story disappeared.

She turned the book over and saw that there was no hero and damsel in distress on the cover, which was now a shade of off-white that looked positively ill.

Nothing.

All she held in her hands was a bundle of paper. Wordless. Story-less. Gone.

She dropped the Had-Been book, and opened another. Empty pages stared at her. She tossed it aside and grabbed another. Wordless pages, stripped of even numbers at their corners.

“Gretta!” Nikki screamed. “They’ve gone!”

“What are you talking about?” Gretta sounded very bored.

Nikki ran towards the desk Gretta was sitting behind and waved a book in her face. “The words are all gone! See?”

Gretta peered down her nose at the empty pages. “Impossible.”

“But it’s true, all of them are like that.”

“Nonsense.” Gretta stood up from her chair and marched to the Sci Fi section, then to the young adult fiction, and finally she was satisfied that every book the library possessed was wordless (which was only partially correct as the non fiction section remained quite intact if anyone had cared to notice). “Nikki, close and lock the doors until we figure this mess out. It would hardly do for some patrons to try to borrow our books and find them lacking. Oh my goodness. What will the head librarian say?”

Most likely nothing useful, but Nikki kept that thought to herself.

The head librarian’s office was rather comfortable. It had soft plush chairs, a coffee pot that was softly percolating in the corner, and there were paintings of fruits and ivied bridges over flowered rivers and other things of that nature.

“Oh what a surprise,” said the Head Librarian as she put down a china tea cup. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We have a bit of a problem,” said Gretta hesitantly.

Nikki stepped forward and thrust three wordless, picture-less books in front of the Head Librarian. “All our fiction is like that! It’s absolutely horrible. And the words just disappeared.” Nikki snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

The Head Mistress took a hurried sip of tea “Most extraordinary.”

“Most dreadful you mean! They’re all gone, all those stories. What if my bookshelf is like that? What will I read?” The thought was most horrifying and Nikki wrung her hands.

“Now now, do calm yourself, dear,” said the head mistress.

“Having hysterics won’t solve anything,” Gretta added dryly.

“Why don’t you go along and do a search on the ‘net while Gretta and I discuss what we ought to do in the mean time?”

Nikki nodded and made her way towards the computer. What exactly would she say in the search engine box? Words gone missing? Story thief? Death of fiction? Fiction murdered? Well, that last one sounded more appropriate for a newspaper headline.

She clicked the internet browser and was politely told that the page could not be displayed, possibly due to the fact that she was not connected to the internet.

Lovely.

She reset the router and tried again, with the same result. “You stupid stupid thing!” she shouted, and slapped it with her hand for good measure.

“I wouldn’t do that you know,” a voice said. It was slightly muffled but it seemed to be coming from the computer tower. “You might offend it.”

She knelt down on one knee and peered into the tangle of wires. Dimly, she saw a small grey figure with pointed ears and long fingers.

“It’s not its fault its been severed from the Internet,” it said, while stroking the wires.

“Well, who’s fault is it then?” said Nikki, before realizing that a more suitable question would have been what the hell are you?.

The thing smiled, showing nastily pointed teeth. “Well, mine of course.”