Vacancies - Part Three

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Chapter One: Vacancies - Part Three

Leander

“Hello?”

Leander’s ears pricked up at the soft, lilting voice that echoed in the silence of the library.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

Jerking himself from his suddenly frozen crouch at the foot of the library ladder, he quickly scuttled soundlessly over the plank wood floors toward his room.

He had to get away. He had to hide even though the musical voice called to him, beckoning him nearer with every word. An inexplicable fear and embarrassment bubbled up beneath his skin, making his itchy legs lope into a stealthy run.

“Hello?”

Why wasn’t the door locked? The door should be locked. Didn’t it normally lock behind him?

He thought it did.

Maybe it didn’t. Otherwise, why hadn’t it locked?

Leander turned, huddled over almost on all fours, as he peeked over the side of one of the large, towering bookshelves. His gray eyes narrowed and focused on the bright, Macintosh-haired boy meandering about his library. One long, tapered finger trailed along the titles with reverent curiosity even as the boy’s startlingly prairie-colored eyes searched the room.

The boy called out again, his brogue softening the consonants and melding the syllables, making the familiar words seem new and exotic, “Flax said I could find you here.”

That traitor! He’d pay for that—if Leander could remember it later. He should make a note. If he could remember to do that once he found a pen and some paper.

Leander leaned out again to stare at the intruder. What was he doing here? No one came into the library. Only the Faceless with armloads of books. Who was this boy wandering about his lair like it was his?

Leander knew he knew the boy, recognized the brilliancy of his hair, the sweet dreaminess in his spring green eyes. But from where?

Leander shook his head, trying to sort through his scattering thoughts. But, like always, the harder he tried to grasp at the wily memories, the further away they fluttered.

The anxiety was there—a skittish, nervy notion that told his every instinct to run, to hide, to escape. It was beating so hard in his head, spreading down through his throat into his chest and down to his legs. He stalked down the length of the shelves just beyond the boy.

Leaning on instinct, Leander knew that if he just kept the boy in the far corner of his periphery, the library shelves would protect him—shield him. Even with the other boy between him and his room, if he just stayed to the shelves’ shadows between the Renaissance artists and the Deconstructionist writers, he could make it.

Slowly—so slowly it hurt legs that longed to lunge and leap to safety—he made his way down the long shelves, sneaking closer to the boy who was still idly studying book spines by sight and touch. Crouched low, the twisted, dark granite-haired boy held still as stone at the edge of the shelf. He held his breath before sprinting across the small walkway into the aisle next to the other, still unaware figure.

Leander closed his eyes, letting the small sounds of the boy’s clicking boots and low, longing humming tell him all he needed to know about his surroundings. Falling into an even stroll with him, only a tall shelf of books separating them, Leander matched his rough-padded, barefoot steps with the rhythmically plodding boots.

Leander’s short, wide nose twitched as he caught scent of something—the boy, perhaps—sweet and spicy, like cloves or ginger.

He breathed deep again as they walked.

Cinnamon!

Cinnamon and sugar with just the slightest tang of apples the same color as his hair.

Together, they walked the aisle for so long at that easy, relaxed pace, that—lured—Leander wasn’t ready when the boy suddenly paused.

Jerked to a stop, with one foot raised ready to step onto the cool wood, the black-haired boy’s tilted, gray eyes popped open.

He turned toward the shelves just in time to see one of the books move from the other side through the empty slot left between the bookends.

“There you are,” the boy said with a startled expression, the book—Jackie Winsor’s Turning Over Stones, A History of Archeology in the Early 1900s—still held in his hand. “I knew you were here.”

Leander felt his heart and breath catch as he stood frozen in place like prey.

What did the red-haired boy want?

His eyes darted from one direction to another, trying to decide whether and where he should run.

“You’re Leander, aren’t you?” the boy asked. “I saw you in the conservatory this morning.”

This morning? Was that where he knew the boy from?

Leander blinked furiously, flashes of the boy playing piano, of standing in front of him with a sheet of glass between them, passed through his mind.

He sucked in a breath and remembered the image of their hands touching against the pane.

He could remember glimpsing the boy through windows, sometimes walking the grounds outside his library, sometimes sitting underneath a tree with a book. He could remember hearing wisps of his song-like words wafting just beyond his walls. They all combined together without sequence or reason, always returning to the image of them face-to-face with only the clear, sun-warmed sheet of glass between them.

“Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor,” Leander heard himself say softly.

The boy smiled brightly. “Yes, that’s right.”

Leander blinked, stunned by that smile. Without thinking, he heard himself mumble, “Written in 1778 for his mother in Paris, it was the first of two sonatas Mozart wrote in the minor key.”

The boy’s freckled brow furrowed. “Sorry?”

Leander snapped his mouth shut, nervously biting his thin lips. Too much. He never knew when to stop. “People diagnosed with autistic disorders often display verbal abnormalities such as poor prosody, tangential and circumstantial speech, and marked verbosity, prolixity, and garrulousness,” he said in a rush, unaware until it was too late that he was already out of breath. Not that Leander was autistic. He didn’t think so. Maybe he was. But, moreover, he was…broken, in a way he doubted anyone understood. He certainly didn’t, no matter how many books he read.

Anyway, he had a point; hadn’t he? What was it?

Taking an extra big inhale—to compensate and to be sure he reached the end of his thought before it too fled—he added, “Which is to say, talks too much.”

Surprised, Leander tilted his head to the side, a curious look on his face. The thought was shorter than he thought it would be. He hoped the other boy wouldn’t notice.

After a pause, the boy shrugged. “I’m Rowan.” He reached out between the books, thrusting his arm through the gap.

Leander reared back from the hand and the strong sweep of scent that followed it, wary instinct sniffing for a trap. “What do you want?”

Rowan flinched at the harsh reserve in the other boy’s voice, quickly pulling his arm back through the hole. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

This time it was Leander who cringed. “No,” he said quickly. “You weren’t. I just...” He trailed off with a shrug.

He wasn’t good with people. Not new people.

Or not-so-new people.

Or really any kind of people.

Biting his lip, he tried to remember how people talked. What did Person A usually say to Person B upon meeting for the first time? “I haven’t seen you around here,” he said, recalling a line from a story he’d read. “Do you come here often?”

The redheaded boy gave him another smile, this one patient and maybe amused—though Leander didn’t know by what. “I brought a book back,” Rowan said, reaching for the second book tucked under his arm.

Leander peered closer, his eyes squinting at the faded gold title—The Bridges Between, A Mystic Map. He looked back up at the boy, who was now smiling.

“And I was wondering—hoping, really—if you might be able to help me find more like it.”

He wanted books. He wanted help. Leander’s help.

Leander could do that!

No one knew the library like Leander did. A wonder of physics, the relatively small library housed every book—past, present, and potential—on its shelves. With the shelves constantly shifting and rearranging themselves, Leander—who had trouble remembering the happenings and events from only hours before—made the perfect keeper of the books.

While any given book was never in the same place from moment to moment, the logic that governed the catalog remained. With his quick mind and adaptive nature, Leander could always find anything among the library shelves.

Reaching out to take the offered book from the elegant, paper-pale hand, Leander held the leather-bound tome in his own much larger grasp. He touched its weathered cover and supple binding, before opening its pages. Skimming the title page, he trailed a finger along the book’s inked history.

It was a companion piece, one in a series of eight books, written between the middle and end of the sixteenth century. Irish, like the boy. In a very specific language that only a handful of people have ever spoken or known. A dead language. Languicide by glottophagy, he thought—huh, funny word. An eaten language.

Lost in the book’s story, he mouthed the book’s words imagining their taste. He turned automatically, letting his instincts lead him among the shelves past the Romantics and evolutionary theorists, hanging a left at French cooking and a right at thirtieth century German periodicals, he headed toward ancient mysticism, the boy’s boots a distant echo hushed among Leander’s thundering thoughts.

Taking a deep breath, inhaling the musty scent of old pages and the earthy musk of leather covers, he stopped. Letting his senses lead him like a bloodhound on the hunt, he turned toward the shelves. Sniffing up, he saw them—neat in a row—the book’s seven mates.

He heard the boy’s audible gasp when he looked at the shelves.

“There’s so many of them.” Rowan moved closer, looking compelled—pulled—toward the tomes. Fingering one of the spines delicately, he read, “Heart in the Hearth, Spells for the Home.” Touching another, he said, “From Birth to Death, A Magician’s Walk.” He turned to Leander, a look of wonder on his face. “This is amazing,” he breathed. “Thank you.”

Leander, his mouth suddenly dry and throat tight, just nodded.

He watched the boy stretch his small, thin, long-limbed form up, reaching for the books, plucking three off the shelf. “Look at these,” Rowan exclaimed, turning to the next set of shelves. “Books on magic tricks—the illusions kind. Houdini. Coin tricks. Escapism.” He laughed and pulled a few of those texts down too. “Too cool.”

Leander smiled at the boy’s laugh, his whole world seeming to close in on that sound. He’d heard of such things, in movies and books, but somehow he was still surprised when his heart seemed to pound while he stared at the boy pouring over the books.

It wasn’t until his lungs began to burn and his stomach churn that he realized he wasn’t being fanciful. No! he thought as panic sunk deep and squeezed his chest. Not now. Leander stumbled back a few steps into the shadows, his arm wrapped around his hunched over middle. He looked up and around, confused as his mind swam with pain.

The door. Why hadn’t the door locked? It usually did, he knew it. Why hadn’t it now?

Biting back an agonized moan, Leander moved as quickly as he could on soundless, calloused feet toward his room, his hands—like massive claws—gripping his shoulders, the nails digging into his fevered skin as if they could tear away the offensive flesh.

What was happening to him?

He thought he really ought to know. That somehow his body already did, the twisting, convulsing memory of his muscles more aware than he.

He jerked, a short, sharp grunt escaping his throat when he heard—felt—his spine crack into place. His round, youthful face contorted into harsh lines and angry planes and his breath panted in pained huffs.

He had to get to the door.

Just a few more feet.

“These are fantastic,” he heard Rowan say, still lost among the pages. Then there was a pause, an expectant lull. “Leander?” he heard him ask. “Leander?”

Damn!

He wanted to shout for the boy to run but, in too much pain to talk, he could do nothing but bite back a groan.

Taking a deep breath, Leander straightened as much as his throbbing, doubled-over form would allow and ran to the back door. He thrust open the heavy, steel door and shut it with a hard slam, hearing it lock behind him.

Leaning against the door, he let out a shaky breath, both relieved and ashamed, before crumbling to the cold, sandstone floor in a tight, frightened ball.

That was close. Too close.

Why hadn’t the door locked? It should have locked. Why hadn’t it?

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