The Library of Forbidden Books

Chapter 8

After Nina signed the papers for her new house, Gretchen opened a bottle of wine for them to celebrate as the evening neared. They had not yet explored the place and since the rain did not show any signs of subsiding anytime soon, the two had made a soaking-wet, short trip to the local supermarket for food and decided to spend the night there before returning to Edinburgh to start arranging for the movers to haul Nina’s possessions to Oban.

It was good to be in the country setting of the small tourist destination where she grew up, but Nina could not help but feel that something was amiss in the town. It was not as if she knew anyone there anymore, but those who had seen her at the house treated her differently without a doubt.

“You are imagining it, Nina,” Gretchen said as she poured the wine. The dark red liquid bubbled as it tumbled into the crystal like an unruly tide coming in.

“I am not. They are still out there, staring at the house. Gives me the fucking creeps,” Nina complained. She felt very uneasy seeing a few people stopping in their tracks and watching the front door.

“Look,” Gretchen passed Nina her glass, “you are alone in a strange village… ”

“You mean, unlike living in a vast anthill like Edinburgh?” Nina retorted.

“You are being paranoid. I bet you the house has a reputation for being haunted or something that represents some local urban legend and nobody can believe that someone actually moved in here. I’ve seen it a million times before with small towns. People are superstitious,” Gretchen theorized, ignoring her friend’s sarcasm.

Nina swallowed half of her helping in one gulp. Through the living room’s bay window she watched the dark shapes come and go, their figures stretching and morphing as the raindrops slid down the glass she looked out from. Some would reluctantly leave because of the stormy weather, but soon they would be substituted by others. At one time she counted fourteen figures standing on the pavement in front of the house.

“Look at that. Explain that,” Nina insisted, pointing back at the window, but Gretchen decided to dismiss the matter and get drunk.

“Have you been through the whole house yet?” she asked Nina.

“Briefly, but not every room,” Nina replied, her mind elsewhere. She played with her fingertip on the rim of the wine glass, suddenly wondering what had become of Sam. Vividly she imagined his face, his naughty dark eyes and his dimples, and what snide remark he would have if he knew she owned an old house. Her chest and tummy filled with warmth for a moment, recalling his touch and the closeness they once had.

“Hey!” Gretchen’s voice jerked Nina back to reality. “It’s going to be night soon. Let’s go check out your castle, my queen.”

Nina nodded. In truth she was quite surprised that she was not feeling as excited about her property as she initially thought she would be. Was she afraid of something? No, she figured, she just missed her familiar life in Edinburgh. She missed Sam, much as she hated him now, and Purdue…

“They’re gone. See?” Gretchen said, peeling back the drapes and looking to the street. “Weather finally got the better of them. Freaks.”

Nina looked around for her phone. She had no idea what she would find and she wanted her cell on hand if anyone was looking for her while she was upstairs or in the basement — anyone… like Sam.

The house smelled musty, as expected. But there was an underlying odor that bothered her senses. It smelled like stagnant water, or the green obscurity of a garden pond. With this salty, damp weather it was to be expected that the place would smell unless it was aired out and it had been standing shut for some time before she liberated it from its purgatory. The house was built from old rock and mortar, like a lot of the castles and fortresses in the Highlands. Nina was just grateful that the previous owners did not spoil it with paint.

Gretchen was like a child in a candy store.

“Look at this! It looks like a shrine!” she exclaimed from one of the rooms ahead of Nina in the corridor.

“I’m not sure that that is something I want to hear, Gretch,” she replied, glass in one hand and phone in the other.

She entered the first guest room. Like the others, it was void of any furniture, but had curtains hung on the windows. The wooden floors were a bit battered, but it was nothing a little TLC and a restoration crew could not fix. Gretch stood in front of a magnificent piece of wrought iron work as tall as the ceiling.

“Wow!” she whispered at the sight of it. Shaped like a grid, it was bolted to the stone wall of the room. It consisted of six vertical bars reaching from the top of the frame to the bottom, with two horizontal bars crossing it diagonally. The edges of the grid ended in ornate curls and Gothic arrow points, asymmetrical and crude. It appeared as if the artisan just welded the lot together to give it a sense of disorder, like the vines of a creeper.

“Reminds me of the head of Medusa,” Gretchen grinned, running her hands over the network of beautiful twists and points. Her hand suddenly jerked back and she winced in pain.

“Ouch! Jesus, what is on this thing?” she whined loudly. Her finger was bleeding. Nina was intrigued.

“Don’t touch the pointy things,” Nina advised, but on examination she noticed that the entire piece’s iron bars consisted of tiny protruding slivers that made up its texture. Like tiny thorns on a rose’s stem they faced upward so that any downward movement of one’s hand would result in injury.

“My God, what a savage work of art!” Gretchen remarked through her teeth as she sucked on her wounded finger. “It is kind of cool, though. Don’t you think?”

“Aye,” Nina smiled, “if you have a mean streak.”

“There’s a waxy substance on some of the curly bits, see?” Gretchen said, pointing it out to Nina without touching anything again. Nina stood on her toes to see.

“Oh!” she smiled, looking enlightened. “I think this was intended to be a giant chandelier, Gretch! Look, the waxy stuff is candle wax and some burnt wick residue caught in the white bits.”

“It must look amazing filled with candles,” Nina’s mildly inebriated friend agreed. “Then it will really look like a shrine.”

Nina gave her a stern look that made them giggle, and they continued on to the rest of the house. It was a beautiful old place with few rooms, yet each room was large and presented a pleasant view, in all directions. The kitchen boasted an antique black coal stove and a modern AGA cooker on the other wall. In the middle of the room stood a heavy oak table that had seen decades of cooking, peeling, and clearly even painting, but it was sturdy and large.

“Look how they damaged this table,” Gretchen said, shaking her head. “They did some art here too, I’m sure. Paint stains and some hardened clay embedded in the cracks. I think the previous guy was an artist, eh?”

“Looks like it,” Nina agreed, checking out the deep sink under the window. It was the only window in the house not dressed in some fabric and the darkness outside was so black that Nina could see their reflection in it. The exposed window made her feel vulnerable, similar to the feeling she got when the crowd congregated in front of her house. She kept feeling as if she was being watched, and now, with no visibility outside, someone could easily be standing right on the other side of the thin layer of glass and she would never know it. The thought made her feel naked, fair game; and she quickly turned and moved to the middle of the room at the table with Gretchen.

“Let’s get out of the kitchen. I want to see the last room at the end of the hallway. Tomorrow I’ll draw up a diagram of the house to see where I want what before the movers come,” Nina told her friend as she finished her wine. It helped to talk about normal things right now and she tried to get her mind off the impending discomfort she felt.

“Okay, but first more wine, yes?” Gretchen giggled.

“Aye, of course!” Nina smiled.

After a quick refill, the two of them stole down the broad corridor to the last room that sat on the right of the T-junction. To the left was the bathroom. Nina only used the uncharted room as an excuse to leave the kitchen, but now she realized that it was indeed a corner of the house that intrigued her.

“Look at this!” she gasped, pulling Gretchen by the arm to join her in the doorway.

“Easy! Spilling my drink here,” her friend complained. She stopped and looked where Nina pointed. “Wow!”

Nina had to smile for the quaint and interesting idea of the room. At first it looked like a regular bedroom, but to their left, in the corner a spiral staircase coiled upward through the ceiling. It was wrought from the same black metal of the grid in the other room, and equally intricate in careless design.

“Cool, huh?” Nina groaned in glee. “Let’s go check it out!” Again Gretchen was being dragged along, staggering over her loose-fitting shoes as she went. They started up the steps, where no trapdoor was fitted. The staircase just continued on up through the ceiling and into another room. Supposedly the attic, the room was the entire length of the east side of the building.

“This is magnificent, Nina!” Gretchen said, her face lit in awe as she looked around.

“It is almost like a whole new floor above the other,” Nina replied, properly fascinated by the omitted feature of her property. “I was not made aware of this extra space, you know. I wonder why she didn’t tell me about this!”

“You can do so much with it. Personally, I would make this my bedroom, all concealed and huge,” Gretchen told Nina. She was right, Nina thought. It was a good idea to make this her bedroom, away from the rest of the house, and with all this space it was hard to resist.

“The previous owner must have been a lot like you, old girl,” Gretchen said from halfway through the room where she sat on her haunches with her glass, fiddling with something in the wall.

“Why?”

“Come look at this. He was a bibliophile of note,” Gretchen said with a touch of suspense and mystery, like the narrator of a fairy tale. Nina rushed over to see what she was meddling with and to her astonishment she found a hidden bounty of old books, stacked within the wall. Nina reached out to the odd collection and noticed something peculiar.

“Gretch, why don’t they have titles?”

“Maybe they are ledgers or something. If they were printed books, they’d surely have titles on the spines, right?” Gretch weighed in, but she did not want to just pull one of the books out, in case they were stacked to support something. She grabbed Nina’s arm as Nina started to remove a book.

“No! You never know what they are doing here. What if you pull it out and the wall caves in?” Gretchen warned.

Nina scoffed and took one, opening it after dusting it off. The first page was indeed handwritten, but what it said unsettled Nina as much as it perplexed her.

“What is it?” Gretchen asked from her crouched position.

Nina examined the old ink scribbling on the first page, and with a quivering voice she read it out to Gretchen, “It says… Mein Kampf.”