The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) by Connolly John

Author:Connolly, John [Connolly, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

TEN

They sat in the gentleman’s living room, drinking tea from china cups and eating some fruitcake that he kept in a tin. A fire had been lit, and a lamp burned in a corner. The walls were decorated with oils and watercolors, all of them very fine and very old. The style of a number of them was familiar to Mr. Berger. He wouldn’t have liked to swear upon it, but he was fairly sure that there was at least one Turner, a Constable, and two Romneys—a portrait and a landscape—among their number.

The old gentleman had introduced himself as Mr. Gedeon, and he had been the librarian at the Caxton for more than forty years. His job, he informed Mr. Berger, was “to maintain and, as required, increase the collection; to perform restorative work on the volumes where necessary; and, of course, to look after the characters.”

It was this last phrase that made Mr. Berger choke slightly on his tea.

“The characters?” he said.

“The characters,” confirmed Mr. Gedeon.

“What characters?”

“The characters from the novels.”

“You mean they’re alive?”

Mr. Berger was beginning to wonder not only about his own sanity but that of Mr. Gedeon as well. He felt as though he had wandered into some strange bibliophilic nightmare. He kept hoping that he would wake up at home with a headache to find that he had been inhaling gum from one of his own volumes.

“You saw one of them,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“Well, I saw someone,” said Mr. Berger. “I mean, I’ve seen chaps dressed up as Napoleon at parties, but I didn’t go home thinking I’d met Napoleon.”

“We don’t have Napoleon,” said Mr. Gedeon.

“No?”

“No. Only fictional characters here. It gets a little complicated with Shakespeare, I must admit. That’s caused us some problems. The rules aren’t hard and fast. If they were, this whole business would run a lot more smoothly. But then, literature isn’t a matter of rules, is it? Think how dull it would be if it was, eh?”

Mr. Berger peered into his teacup, as though expecting the arrangement of the leaves to reveal the truth of things. When they did not, he put the cup down, clasped his hands, and resigned himself to whatever was to come.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me about the characters…”

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