Yankee Republic Omnibus: A Mythic Radio Adventure by Fenton Wood

Author:Fenton Wood [Wood, Fenton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

25. POETRY AND PROSE

Down, down, into the roots of the mountain they walked. The tunnel grew no wider, but it grew less curved as the diameter of the spiral increased.

The books gave way to miles of empty shelves. Then the shelves gave way to bare rock.

They passed the last of the electric lights. Moustache produced an old-fashioned brass flashlight from his pocket. It was shaped in imitation of a candlestick holder, with a small platter holding a vertical battery compartment, a handle on one side, and an electric lamp on the other. It shed a flickering and feeble light.

They went another five hundred feet, down into the darkness. “We go no further,” said Moustache. “No one knows how deep the tunnel goes, or what may be lurking in the depths. Explorers have gone past this point and never returned. Perhaps they were overcome by poisonous gases, or something worse.”

He produced a hand-held magnet and pressed it against a certain spot in the wall. There was a muffled clunk, and part of the wall swung open. It was a heavy iron door, well-balanced and silent, disguised by a thin layer of rock attached to its outer face.

They walked through a series of small rooms, lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. They had the same brick and mortar construction as the upper rooms, but less rough-hewn and more ornate, as if greater care had gone into their construction. There was no central room or corridor; each room had one, two, or three doorways which opened onto other rooms.

“These rooms were constructed centuries ago by the first Librarians, by subdividing sections of the Great Corridor. The rooms connect to each other in a complex pattern designed for maximum confusion. This was done for defensive purposes, so that intruders would quickly become lost and never find their way out.”

They wandered through dozens of rooms, until Philo was indeed lost beyond hope of finding his way out without assistance.

“There are over a million books in these rooms, carefully preserved by generations of Librarians,” said Moustache. “But that doesn’t mean all of them are valuable. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“There are books of gibberish, having the form of language without the meaning, created by the disordered minds of graphomaniacs, logorrheacs, and glossolalians. There are massive tomes devoted to every pseudoscience ever conceived, with erudite references to other tomes equally unscientific. There are encyclopedias of fictional worlds, complete with their own history, biology, and language. There are 450 different translations of the Holy Bible in English alone, and thousands more in other languages. There are codices and pseudo-codices, produced by human hands but never deciphered despite the efforts of numerous scholars. There are books in at least seven thousand living languages, and two thousand dead ones. There are entire rooms full of trashy romance novels, formulaic murder mysteries, and self-help books that never helped anyone. There are books written entirely in schizophasia, with perfectly formed sentences forever hovering on the edge of meaning. There are books

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