Somewhere one of the walls blows in; there are so many floors, there must always be one with a bomb just going off. Through the dust and the smoke vague figures move: green eyes aglow, hoods pulled down low, reeds tied around their waists. They speak a forgotten tongue, an Adamic babble, just above the edge of hearing.

The library is hexagonal, with a central well that stretches up to infinity and down to infinity, with a railing around the edge. A book dropped over the side—and there have been many, uncountable infinities of books—will fall forever, rise forever. If the well is not choked with falling books, it is only because the infinite collection is dwarfed by the infinite building, which is itself dwarfed by the infinite well. The well is empty.

Outside is a quiet plaza, seven sided, inlaid with stones, shaded by trees and old buildings. The library’s doors have closed for the first time, never to be reopened, and so they have come, the all-devouring, the desperate. The words must flow, must flow without end, in their infinite variation, their infinite meaning, their infinite meaninglessness. On other floors, the librarians work undisturbed at their eternal task, breeding categories out of systems, chaos out of order, hydras out of serpents.

So it has been written, so it shall be unwritten.

Lew meets her walking along the train tracks that run along the channel between the town and the island, a short, nondescript sort of woman in dun colored pants and a hoodie slightly too large for her body. “You lost,” he says; not a question because no one comes to the tracks intentionally unless they were getting paid to be there, and he knows all those folks.

“No,” she says, maybe; it’s hard to tell. She speaks down into her chest, and her voice is muffled by the hood. “I’m supposed to meet someone here.”

“Here?” He looks around. The sunset is nice enough, and you can see the water and the city floating on the other side of it alright, but mostly what you see is rubble and barbed wire and oil. “You don’t want to meet anyone here. It’s dangerous.”

“Here’s where he said, here’s where I am.”

Lew shrugs, and keeps moving. When he passes back by at the end of his shift she’s still sitting there, hunched forward a little. Light from the yard picks out a pile of clothes dumped at her feet. The bottoms of her pants are soaked to the knees. He hitches his step and she sways towards him, just a little, and he thinks better of it. At three am you let them have the night who want it.

“We will expedite our glorious fathers! The return of Uriel, the divine sentinel, the reborn Lesbians to stand guard upon hir gate!”

A woman screams, chokes, crashes against furniture. A shrieking of crickets. Burgess Meredith, young and saturnine, bellows from offstage, cackles, laughs, slaps palms together.

“Rise! Rise!” Blare of trumpets. “You have been chosen of the lord God! Now you must destroy yourself, be one with us, be one with our kingdom!”

Another voice from below the floor: “Take it! Let this night lead you to us! Make you well again!”

A chiming of bells echoes off the distant cliffs of the city. A cacophony of seagulls, crashing of waves, the orchestra loses its goddamn mind, strings warring on brass, percussion shaking the walls of Jericho.

“Resist! Desist!”

In her hand a triangular knife. The old man’s blood wet upon her dress. The music and voices swell beyond bearing and—

It sneaks up on him when he’s twelve.

“Why is the basement always locked?”

“Oh, there’s a lot of tools and things down there, you could hurt yourself,” says his father, making him a sandwich. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Why do you keep planting rosebushes?” The garden overflows; the backyard is a maze of thorns and blossoms. It’s a thick, heavy smell, like the back of a closet, like retirement candy.

“They’re beautiful blooms,” he says, leather gloves up to his elbows, leaning on the handle of a shovel. “And it’s good exercise, all this digging.”

“What are you doing in the attic?”

“Just moving old furniture around.” He’s looking up at his father crouched at the lip of the trapdoor. Lit from below he’s genial and sinister, like a chuckling halloween decoration. “Don’t come up, there’s fiberglass insulation up here.”

At night something moves in the walls, drags itself across the floor above. When he comes out of his room to check, his father is there, sitting on a kitchen chair in the hallway, drinking quietly in the dark. “Go back to bed, son my son. There’s nothing to worry about. Dad’s here to keep you safe while you’re young.”