Spiritwalk by Charles De Lint

Author:Charles De Lint
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2012-02-05T15:46:48+00:00

8

Ginny Saunders was putting away books in the Library that evening. Esmeralda marked the passages and chapters to be entered into the computer, and the students they'd hired did the actual data entry, but it was Ginny who knew where to find the necessary texts and insisted on replacing them on their shelves herself afterward. If was the last thing she did every night before leaving the Library, the final task of her daily routine.

She enjoyed the solitude at that time of day, the sense of orderliness and completion that the practice of tidying up left her with. She read voraciously, but was also a lover of books for their own sake. She appreciated the look of the bindings, lined up in neat rows on the shelves, the idea that so much knowledge and thought was tucked away between the boards of all those many books under her care.

She knew that there were people who thought she was a little strange—"moling away" in here, as Tim liked to put it—but it didn't bother her for a moment what people thought. She'd been wealthy in her time, and she'd been poor, but this was the first time she'd been responsible for something and she liked the feeling. It might just be a private library, in an odd old house, and she received only her room and board for her work, but it was still a full-time job and the satisfaction she derived from it more than made up for what people thought she was missing in the world that turned and spun on its mad axis beyond the Library's walls. She'd spent most of her life in that world and found only sorrow and pain there.

Neither existed for her here. Here she didn't need a shell to protect her from the world—the House itself provided that. Here she could vicariously experience what she'd never had the nerve or understanding to sample before. Here she could finally relax and be herself. And it wasn't boring. Not for a moment. Not with all these books, nor the glass display cases laden with curiosities and artifacts, nor the trickle of genuinely interesting people who made their treks into what she thought of as the mind of this fascinating building.

She hummed tunelessly under her breath as she shifted the ladder to the next shelf. Beth Norton, a second-year Carleton University student, had just left to pick her daughter up from the babysitter's and there was no one else about. The room was still, holding that special kind of quiet that only a large room can. Picking up the twelfth volume of Frazer's original Golden Bough, Ginny stepped onto the ladder, then paused.

The book felt odd in her hand. The leather binding was suddenly rough with an almost barklike texture. The weight was different than she remembered it to be.

Frowning, she took it over under a light. The binding looked as though someone had taken a vegetable grater to its surface. She ran a finger across the roughness and her frown deepened.

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