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  THE SECRET LIBRARY: Call of Kuyr

  Copyright © 2019 Jonathan Gilbert

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Tardigrade House 2019

  Auckland, New Zealand

  No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

  Cover Design by saraoliverdesign.com

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Secret Library: Call of Kuyr

  J. C. Gilbert

  Book Two

  For Mumsy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Have you ever been attacked by a hoard of rabid Teddy bears? Well, these things were armed, furious, and right behind us.

  "Just keep running!" I called after Lilly. For a moment, she had stopped, waiting for me to catch up. "There is no use if both of us are caught!"

  "I want to smoosh them so bad!" yelled Lilly back over her shoulder. Despite the terrifying nature of the situation, she still had a giant smile plastered all over her face. The transformation of terror into thrills is a magic which I have not yet mastered.

  The jungle all around us was deep green, dense, and menacing. The void stone I clenched in my hand felt cool in the tropical heat. We ran on.

  Up ahead, I could see Lilly hesitating for a moment and then leaping forward. Soon I came to the same muddy stream and did my best to jump likewise. I landed with one foot in the stream, and scrambled with the other up the far bank.

  For a fleeting moment I thought I had dropped the void stone. Hank burrowed up my throat, and pressed his sharp quills into my esophagus. I looked down to see the void stone muddied but still in my grasp.

  A hand appeared from above, and soon Lilly was pulling me up. My feet were heavy and caked with mud. Lilly was panting for air, her cheeks flushed with the exertion.

  "This place is great!" she said, "are you alright?"

  "I'm fine, just keep going."

  There was a sharp whistle and a thud. An arrow lodged itself into a trunk, two inches from my face. For a split second, my mind was drawn to how smooth the shaft was, and how realistic the bright red feathers seemed.

  Then I remembered just how real they were, how real all of it was. Less than a month ago if you had asked me to describe libraries to you, I might have described them as quiet places where you can spend a cozy afternoon listening to the rain on the roof and getting lost. But since then, I have been captured, threatened, and chased within the seemingly safe walls of a library. Well, within The Library. I suppose it is an important detail that when I mention The Library, I am talking about the greatest library that ever there was. You see, at the center of all things, known, unknown, and unknowable, there is the spinning orb of creation. This orb is the physical manifestation of the vast void of nothingness which existed before all things. Not far from this orb is the Desk of the Librarian. The Librarian is, well, quite unique.

  "OK, frendo," said Lilly, "let's just stare at the weapon for a time, shall we?"

  The ground became steep and rose beneath us. The shrill cries and shouts of the Teddy bears were getting closer now. I had never before been in a place so green. All the plants looked oversized and vaguely threatening. The heat was different here too, almost physical. We were both drenched in sweat, and the heat made everything seem so surreal, as if it wasn't already surreal enough.

  Nowadays, I spent a good deal of my spare time working with the Librarian. She selected the books for me to read, and I read them. If the books were not too chaotic, I might read them alone, but most of the time I read them with my best friend, Lilly. She treated my missions like they were games. Though this did sometimes mean that she didn't take things as seriously as perhaps she should, it also meant that I was less likely to fret over things. It's hard to remain terrified when the person next to you is cracking jokes and trying to find the right moment for some obscure pop-culture reference.

  Sometimes Darcy joined us too. I'm still not quite sure about that guy. His heart seems to be in the right place, but if anything, he makes things harder. Darcy is always beating up on himself if he makes a mistake. Sometimes this comes as a sudden burst of 'idiot!' as he strikes a tree or other nearby object, but usually I can tell because he gets all quiet and broody.

  Today we left Darcy waiting for us with our boat by the shore. He had been quite torn as to whether or not he should come along with us to search a crash site for the void stone described by the Librarian. On the one hand, he thought he should come to 'keep us safe.' On the other hand, he thought he should stay with the boat because he was the faster rower. Lilly did a poor job of hiding her amusement over his pseudo-chivalric self-torment. For some reason she didn't seem to see how genuinely torn up he got over little things like that.

  "Pity you can't just tear off your arms and leave them with the boat. Then we could have had Darcy the T-rex edition frighten off our attackers with his powerful glares. Look, there, he is glaring at me right now." That's when Lilly picked up a stone from the shoreline and offered it to him, shielding her eyes. "Take it. Just take it!"

  That must have been almost five hours ago now. Darcy was probably tearing his arms off in worry by now.

  It was all about the stone, really. You see, something happened to The Library soon after I became its Keeper. There were some mistakes made on the part of, well, me. I know, I know, I couldn't have known that my 'friend' Elaine was secretly the ethically flexible sorceress Vicious, but somehow I think I should probably have figured it out sooner.

  Hindsight is a citag, as Lilly would say.

  Anyway, the result was the same. Elaine got into the Library and tried to steal its power and in the process managed to infect a good chunk of the Library with the chaos of the Library's Heart which was itself the void of creation, in a complicated metaphorical come physical sense.

  Once a
book is tainted with the power of the void things start to change inside. Otherwise peaceful lives were interrupted with happenings which we could only describe as magical. This was not new to The Library. Sometimes books just ended up with a bit of magic in the natural course of things. That's why the Keepers existed to put things right. But for only the second time in the history of the Library, mass damage had been done.

  It is my job to undo this damage.

  Sometimes this means finding a magical creature and returning them to their lands, sometimes it means ensuring that the right young farmhand finds the right weapon of destiny so that they could rule the right archaic system of government.

  Today we had to find a crashed spaceship and a void stone.

  As we ran, I could hear the roaring ocean getting louder up ahead. Lilly stopped for a moment, "almost there!" she said.

  "For goodness sake, Lilly, just run!"

  The Librarian read ahead in the books sometimes to help us find what was wrong so that we could perform our surgical narrative strike. This would have been far more useful if the books didn't frequently distort the truth and sometimes outright lie about things. The Librarian had called it 'Unreliable Narration.'

  We found the crashed ship in the middle of an impact crater. A half dozen Teddy bears had set up tents where the trees had been flattened all around the smoldering wreckage. We didn't know what they wanted with the ship, only that leaving the stone there could end in disaster.

  I call them Teddy bears because that is literally what they look like. They were all about two feet tall and clothed in rags. They nattered to each other in a language so different from our own that I'm not even sure if language is the right word for the noises.

  They were watchful. Behind those jet-black eyes was a danger detection system developed over millions of years of evolution. They appeared to be the dominant species on this planet, and we couldn't underestimate them. We needed a distraction.

  As it turns out, Lilly is pretty good at creating weird noises when she needs to be. I almost jumped when I heard the distinct sound of an elephant coming from a nearby tree. I must remember to ask her how she did that.

  With the little bears gone, I crept down the crater's ridge and toward the wreckage. At first, I wasn't sure which stone was the void stone, as there were several sphere-like objects embedded into the metal and scattered around the site.

  Then I saw it.

  The stone glowed faintly green, embedded as it was in the back of the ship.

  Hank almost cried when I saw that there was something dead inside the ship. Oh, by the way, Hank is just a name I have for my anxiety. Don't worry about him. He is just an over-excited hedgehog.

  Cringing, I pinched the fastening clips and removed the void stone. For a moment I watched it as the light within dimmed. Then I heard the shouts and the calls as the sentries were alerted and began the chase.

  And now?

  Lilly stopped again.

  "Just go-" I started, but then I saw it too.

  We had reached a cliff edge. The waves were some ten feet below. Hank gulped.

  "All kinds of nope," said Lilly between gasps of air.

  The sound of the bears behind us grew louder. I looked at the void stone.

  "Do we just give it back?" I asked.

  "And I'm sure they will say 'thank you, have a nice day' and leave us to find our own way to the water. That's certainly the impression I got from their yelling and their projectile weapons."

  "Then what do we do?"

  There was crash as the Teddy bears pushed through the edge of the jungle. I looked over my shoulder to see them gathered. The crash site bears had been joined by others. There must have been at least 10 of them. One growled at me and waved its wee spear. They were adorable.

  "So, we are doing this?" asked Lilly.

  My heart was pounding in my chest. Eyes wide, I nodded.

  Lilly took my hand, and together, we jumped.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I braced myself for impact and was struck with a wall of water. Though the water was warm, it was still refreshing after running in the heat. My heart was going berserk.

  I felt alive.

  I spun about, looking for Lilly. She was not far from me, grinning from ear to ear.

  I held up the stone for Lilly to see that I still had it.

  "Excellent," she said.

  There was a 'plop' as an arrow pierced the water's surface inches from Lilly's shoulder.

  "Time to swim!" she said, raising one eyebrow. Hank shot her a nasty look. How was she still enjoying this?

  Wait, was I enjoying this?

  I have never been much of a swimmer, but I understood the basics, and being shot out creates a surprisingly motivating dynamic. Soon we were out of the range of the arrow fire and doing our best to stay afloat in the middle of an expanse of water.

  I tried not to think about sharks.

  I tried not to think about what sharks might be like inside a magical book.

  "I'm not fine," I squeaked.

  "What?" asked Lilly, who was herself gazing into the watery depths.

  "Ahoy!" called a voice.

  We both spun around to see an approaching boat. It was Darcy. He was probably the only person in the world who would use 'ahoy' as a legitimate vocabulary choice rather than just a joke.

  My heart raced as he approached. There seemed to be a direct correlation between my mind's imaginings of what was in the water below and how distant Darcy was from us. By the time he had arrived, Cuthulu might have been reaching for my water soaked sneakers.

  Darcy pulled Lilly up first. Lilly shot him a look as if to say 'don't you know we should be looking after Alex first?' It wasn't my favorite look in the world. She did have a tendency to baby me. But at times like this, I didn't much care. I just didn't want to get eaten.

  "I saw you jump," he said once we were onboard.

  "Your telescope is ridiculous," said Lilly, "and thank you for having it."

  "I should have gone with you," said Darcy, "I don't like this."

  "If you had come, then who would have pulled us from the water?" asked Lilly, her tine teasing.

  "I know," said Darcy, frowning and shaking his head.

  "But then again, if you had been with us then maybe we wouldn't have gotten into any trouble at all."

  Darcy breathed in sharply and visibly winced. "I don't like this one bit," he said.

  "We need to get to my book," I said. I didn't like to be away from the books for long. They were our only contact with The Library, after all.

  "Give me a minute," said Darcy, a little annoyed, "I'm just glad the both of you are safe."

  "Sorry," I said, remembering how hard he must have rowed to get to us.

  Darcy stretched, picked up the oars, and started rowing back along the coast. I felt bad for not giving him more time to rest, but I couldn't help it. Hank was always a little more active when there was no book to escape into.

  We hid the book in a cave. I know, sounds a little sus. But you see, we are still trying to work out what safety precautions we should take. Traditionally, as the Librarian had told us, Keepers hold on to the books wherever they go. Unfortunately this recently led to the almost complete destruction of literally everything, so when the Librarian suggested that we stow the books away in hidden places when we enter a new story, I was willing to give it a try.

  But now this meant I no longer had a quick escape route out of danger. A part of me which I hated couldn't help but draw the conclusion that the Librarian thought my friends and I were expendable, but the books were not. I know there is much more at stake than that, but you know how minds are. They say things.

  The boat slid onto the sand with a hiss. Darcy mechanically set the oars aside and jumped out. He started pulling the boat on shore before we were even out.

  "You really do want to pull those things right off, don't you?" asked Lilly.

  "What?"

  "Your arms, dude. Give it a re
st, hero."

  Darcy looked self-conscious.

  Lilly swung herself out of the boat and landed in the water with a splash. In no time she was hopping from rock to rock as she made her way toward the cave which held our ticket off of this island.

  The sun had dried most of the sea water off of my back, but my shoes were still damp. Salt now encrusted my hair and my skin. I stepped out into the shallow water. My legs were a little shaky from the run, and I was pretty much exhausted.

  I gazed up the coastline. It was rugged down this way with vast stretches of rock jutting out into the ocean. The waves were growing turbulent now. Then I saw something that made me start. For a fleeting instance, I thought I saw someone on the rocks.

  "Elaine?" I asked softly.

  I looked about to see if Darcy had heard me, but he seemed lost in a world of his own. When I turned back, the figure was gone. In its place was nothing but the crashing waves. This wasn't the first time that I had imagined seeing her. It was getting weird.

  I shook my head and tried to work out how much time had passed since we had come to this book. The sun was getting lower in the sky. Many of the stories matched our day and night cycle exactly, but this one was a little out of sync.

  "It must be midnight," said Darcy, he must have been thinking the same thing, "I needed to have gotten back hours ago."

  I wanted to tell him not to beat himself up. I may have even said something to that effect if I wasn't such an awkward human. I managed a frown.

  "Got it!" called Lilly from inside the cave.

  "Careful on the rocks!" said Darcy as Lilly bounded towards us.

  "No!" said Lilly with mocking tones.

  I wish they could just get along.

  Once Lilly was with us, she passed me the book. I opened it to the first page and began to read. Within moments the light in my peripheral went dark, and my heart ceased to beat. All the air went out of my lungs, and we were pulled into the book. Soon we were rushing through the empty air, surrounded by fluttering pages and nothingness.