Monsters in the Library

A Story by Andrew Smith

Larry's day was like any other; wake up and beg for some change, go to the library and kill a monster...

It was a warm Tuesday as the sun rose over the abandoned
parking garage where Larry was sleeping. The sun crept
through a crack in the wall and pierced him in the eyes. It
was a wake up call he tried to ignore as he rolled over
showing the sunlight his back. Soon the room that had given
him shelter for the evening was ablaze with light. Larry
could not escape it, even with his forearm covering his eyes.
So with a strain and a lunge, he awoke and began his day.
Larry had often thought of covering the hole in the wall, but
knew without it he may never get up at all.

    Larry had been homeless for most of his adult life;
around thirty years. He was fast approaching sixty, but some
mornings it felt more like he was nearing one hundred.  This
underground parking facility had been his shelter for most of it. He had found a back entrance to an adjoining office one day and was amazed to see that it was still vacant that evening. Where he was from, there was a pandemic of homelessness that existed because of the warm climate, so it was rare to find a spot not occupied by someone willing to defend their space with maximum force. Somehow this office

space had been empty and with some luck and ingenuity on his
part, had remained hidden from the world. The office had one
door and one window. The door lead into the basement of the
parking garage and the window was at ground level to an alley
that no one seemingly used.

    Years earlier while exploring the lot, Larry found some
supplies, including industrial glue, old paint cans and a
large panel of wood that was about five feet wide and seven
feet tall. The wood wasn’t very sturdy or strong but it gave
him the idea to close off the main entrance to his home from
other homeless and hide it from vandals that would routinely
raid the parking garage. He had used the wood panel and the
glue to cover the door, sealing the main entry closed from
the outside world, making it appear as if there were no room
at all. He was even able to mix all the paints together to
create a nasty brown grey that acted as a complete camouflage		in the darkness of the parking garage. With no one knowing		about his place of residence, he was able to live his life in		peace while everyone else fought over the parking garage itself.

    As Larry looked at himself in the mirror he attempted to
groom his stagily beard with a comb that was missing several
teeth before covering his dreaded hair with a baseball cap
that had seen better days. He used to have a pair of scissors
that he would use to periodically trim his hair but they had
gone missing a year or so back and he was waiting for fate to
bring him another. His grey sports jacket and black pants
were next, each with more stains then not and a smell that
made it easy for someone not to feel bad for crossing the
street to avoid Larry as he approached.

    With his outfit on and as good as it was going to get,
Larry set out for his day. He hopped on a workbench and then
crawled out the window into the alley. Before leaving, Larry
made sure to cover the window with several old pallets he had
collected. No one ever walked this alley but Larry was sure
that one day someone would and he couldn’t have them finding
his residence.

    As always, Larry’s day began with begging for an hour
outside the train station near the financial district. On
recent days Larry hadn’t been able to receive enough for more
then one meal a day. The colder weather tended to make the
pedestrians a little more quick in their step and far more
likely to ignore the pleas of an old vagabond, but today was
different. The sun shone brightly on the city. The train
passengers had a little more pep in their walk and were happy
to observe the day as they shed their overcoats.

    “Spare some change, so I can get something to eat?” Larry
asked, as a tall man in suit and tie passed him by.

    The man stopped and looked Larry once over reaching into
his pocket and with a smile threw several coins into Larry’s
hat. This was a good sign for his first encounter of the day.
Larry took half the coins and put them into his pocket, a
trick that he had observed in his early days on the street.
He continued to panhandle as more dollars and cents were
dropped into his hat. His usual way was to wait until he got
about fifteen dollars, this was on a good day. This amount
would be enough to buy some cans of soup, a few bread rolls
and just enough money left over for a bottle of wine that he
loved; the ‘Sea Shell Red’ sparkling wine, at eight dollars 		plus tax. It wasn’t so sweet that it gave the drinker a			headache and featured bubbles that reminded Larry of better		times. The wine had become a necessity to Larry as it helped		him get to sleep and stay asleep; without it he would be		woken by night terrors, at least that’s what would happed		whenever he tried to go a night without drinking.

    “Here you go, have a great day...” said a young woman in a
charity uniform as she handed Larry a small parcel that
contained a sandwich, a bottle of water and a small first aid
kit.

    People like her were around sometimes, different
organizations liked to focus on the homeless outside of the
shelter system. At times they were Godsends and other times
they were judgmental busybody’s. Today was the latter.

    “Thank you, god bless” Larry murmured as he placed the
package in his bag and wandered off.

    It was always a good idea to get away from the do-gooders
as soon as possible before they attempted to talk you into
joining their program. You never know which organization is a
front for an organ harvesting operation or worse, a church
group.

    Once Larry had some distance from the young lady that had
given him breakfast, he looked at his take for the day. To
his delight he had had a profitable morning. Over the last
hour he had collected thirty-five dollars, a sandwich, a
bottle of water, a small first aid kit and one loose
cigarette. With a haul like this Larry did not have to beg
for a day or two if he didn’t want to and if he continued on
his planned shopping and refrained from buying a better
bottle of wine.

    With that Larry made his way to his place of business,
the Library. It was a seven story building that housed
thousands of books on every floor. As Larry walked past the
librarians he smiled. They glared back. Larry and several
others like him had been using this library as their base of
operation for just over twenty-nine years now. He and others
had made it their mission to find irregularities in the
books. To most it would look like a word that had been
misspelled, sometimes over and over again, other times only
once. Larry believed there were bigger forces at play. He
walked up several flights of stairs to the seventh floor,
fiction and biographies. Some had questioned why these two
categories were right next to one another creating a yin and 		yang pairing. Larry had commented several times over the last		few years that it was all fiction to anyone who would listen, 		but few did.

    As he perused the fiction section, an obscure children’s
horror book titled ‘Sleep Away’ caught his attention. The
blurb stated something about a boys adventure as he navigated
the dream world.

    “Something about leaving your body for an adventure,”
Larry muttered to himself, as he glanced page after page
reading but not really taking in the information.

    Larry’s eyes pricked. He had found an irregularity.
Located on page 127 as the climax neared, he spotted a
spelling mistake that read as follows:

    ‘Jesse awoke in a panic as he flung off his blanket and
racced from his bedroom, he had to find out if Liz was safe.’

    The thirteenth word of the sentence he had found on the
127th page was something that most would overlook, but Larry
had been doing this for too long to let something like this
slide. He stood up and looked around, no one was in his
vicinity. This was what Larry was hoping for. He reached into
his bag and pulled out a travel neck pillow, placed it around
his neck and made his way to a corner of the room. He sat with his 	back upright to the wall with one shoulder to the

corner, bracing himself for something to come. Once he was
situated, Larry began to look at the sentence more intently.

    “Jesse awoke in a panic as he flung off his blanket and
racced from his bedroom, he had to find out if Liz was safe.”
Larry began to repeat over and over again in his head as he
sat on the Library floor, as if it was his mantra.

    “Jesse awoke in a panic as he flung off his blanket and
racced from his bedroom, he had to find out if Liz was safe.”
Whispering through his mind again and again, until the words
themselves lost all meaning.

    Larry closed his eyes and his head slowly began to fall
towards his shoulder. His neck pillow, although considerable
warn was able to offer some support. A librarian walked by
Larry as his head nodded up and down, she chose to ignore him
as she continued shelving books. In the past the library had
tried to implement a policy of waking sleeping vagrants, but
it had never ended well for the person who had to accomplish
the task, so now they let them be.

    “Jesse awoke in a panic as he flung off his blanket and
racced from his bedroom, he had to find out if Liz was safe.”

Smith - Monsters in the Library - !9

The words ran around Larry’s brain until nothing else
existed.

    With his eyes shut he imagined the world around him. The
books, shelves, long reading tables, walls, ceiling and
floor. This was about to change.

    As the sentence echoed in his head, he watched as his
reality slowly began to disappear. First the colors of the
books and the walls began to merge as if they were being
washed away. Colors began to move across the room. Reds,
greens, browns, blues, pinks and oranges moved like waves as
they crashed into one another creating a kaleidoscope effect.
As this was happening the outlines of everything began to
change, straight lines became curly squiggles, curves became
triangles, large became small and small became large. The
lines were becoming something else. A new world. Lines
started to take form of trees and houses, roads and street
signs. The colors continued to crash into one another but as
they did they now were working to illuminate the world that
the lines had created. The trees took some brown, the reds
looked for cars and mail boxes, the greens found the grass.
Larry watched as a wave of blue crashed over a house as he
repeated the sentence once more.

    “Jesse awoke in a panic as he flung off his blanket and
racced from his bedroom, he had to find out if Liz was safe.”
    With that this new world had been created. Larry stood up

to see what he was looking at. Before him stood a blue house
in the middle of a suburban street. People were leaving their
houses to go to work and kids were getting on their bikes to
go to school as they kissed their mothers good bye. All of a
sudden a boy raced out of his front door with it slamming
behind him. He seemed in a rush, with a look of fear sprawled
across his face. Larry had found his books protagonist. He
watched as the boy raced down the street on his bike and
turned the corner. The boy was of no concern to Larry, it was
the environment that he was interested in, more specifically
something he knew was hiding in it.

    Larry approached the boys front door and to his surprise
it was unlocked.

    “Looks like the books hero in all his zeal had forgotten
to lock up after himself” he thought to himself.

    Larry walked into the house, in through the entrance way
and up a flight of stairs. He remembered that the boys room
was on the second floor just past the Grandmothers room. He
passed a door that he observed the sound of heavy breathing.

He recognized it as the Grandmother, asleep in her vegetative
state. He continued onto Jesse’s room. As he entered he was
immediately reminded of the smell that a boy going through
puberty can only produce, but this was not his concern. He
looked around the seemingly average room and found nothing
out of place, but he had a trick.

    “SHOW YOURSELF, ONE WHO DOES NOT BELONG IN THIS WORLD, OR
BE GONE FOREVER!” boomed from Larry, as he stood in the
centre of the room.

    “Who dares to enter my domain and ask me to leave?” said
a slithering voice coming from the boys closet.

    “I am Larry Willmore and you are an intruder to this
world and not welcome to this domain. I will say it again,
show your face or leave this world!” said Larry, with an ever
increasing look of anger on his face.

    The closet door swung open and hit the wall with a crash.
It rattled the house and caused a neighborhood dog to bark.
Sure enough once the dust settled a tall figure slid out of
the closet. He was much larger than the closet would allow,
bones cracking as he stretched out his spine and limbs. He
was muscular with, what appeared to be, several large horns
on his head as if a crown. His fingers were long, slender and pointy. His whole body shimmered as if covered with glitter,

but on closer inspection was a sickly green. He stared at
Larry with black eyes and snarled with teeth that were rotten
yet sharp.

    “You will die before I would leave this world. Leave now
or die!” said the beast.

    “By the power of the creators, you are bound and cannot
move,” said Larry as he approached the beast.

    The beast laughed, “Do you think that cheap sorcery will
work on me?”

    With that the beast lunged at Larry, wrestling him to the
ground. In a moment, he had Larry pinned to the floor and
raised his hand to deliver a death stroke. Larry’s life
flashed before his eyes, before he remembered that his
mission was too important to end yet. With every ounce of
energy Larry had within him, he pushed on the stomach of the
beast while kneeing him in the crotch.

    “AAAARRRGG!!” screamed the beast, as it retreated enough
for Larry to escape from underneath him, but not before
delivering a blow to Larry’s face from his passing elbow.

    As Larry stood up he wiped the blood spilling from his
mouth onto his sleeve and prepared to fight. He knew that this beast was more powerful than what he usually encountered

and would require some actions that Larry hated to
participate in.

    Larry produced a knife from his pocket. The blade was
about two inches long and the handle worn of grip. He placed
his hand in front of his face with his palm facing the beast.
He then proceeded to slice down his palm diagonally from the
base of his pinky finger to the base of his thumb. Suddenly
realizing what Larry was doing, the beast lunged towards him
screaming. Before the beast could reach his target, Larry
once again recited his spell,

    “By the power of the creators, you are bound and cannot
move!”

    The beast froze mid air. His razor sharp fingers only an
inch or so from Larry’s neck. Larry held his cut hand closed,
stealing one of Jesse’s pillow cases to wrap the wound. With
his free hand he guided the rigid body of the beast to the
bedroom floor.

    “Please I beg you. Let me leave. Let me return from where
I came,” begged the beast.

    He closed the beasts mouth and then proceeded to use his
knife to cut open the beasts chest. The smell was putrid and

his organs while looking human in form, were green and
rotting. Larry had worked out a long time ago that the
existence of these beasts was constant agony. They had turned
away from their true purpose and their bodies had been
punishing them for it ever since. This didn’t stop them from
clinging to a life they hated and by proxy of living within
the books cursing the lives of any poor soul that was unlucky
enough to borrow any of the infected reading material.

    With one swipe Larry cut the heart loose from the beast’s
body and it was dead. Slowly the beast began to vanish. Larry
stood up and with his free hand tried to straighten up the
room as best as he could. Luckily for him, it was that of a
teenage boy, so it was trashed to begin with.

    With the job done, Larry sat down in the corner of
Jesse’s room and began to think of the library, but the
battle that he had just taken part in had taken all his
strength and he soon passed out.

    When he awoke he was back to his workplace, the library.
The mission had been a success. As he looked through a window
he realized the day had passed and it was seemingly sunset, a
look to the clock confirmed this. For a moment Larry sat back
before a librarian entered the area and demand he leave as

the library was about to close.  Larry agreed with a nod and
proceeded, gathering his belongings. He walked down several
flights of stairs through the now empty halls as lone
librarians stared him down. As he exited through the door he
could hear a swift turning of the locks and chatter that he
assumed was about him.

    Larry walked home along his usual path, making his two
stops before home. First was the liquor store followed by the
grocery store. Larry remembered that he had collected thirty-
five dollars that morning and this should be enough to last
him several days. He just needed to make sure he bought his
usual ‘Sea Shell Red' sparkling for eight dollars plus tax.
Once he was in the store, Larry immediately walked to the
rack of his usual hooch. They were offering a ‘buy two, get
one free’ on the wine. He thought if he bought two, he could
have three and still have plenty of money for food. He walked
to the counter with the three bottles and placed them on the
counter. As he reached into his bag for the money he noticed
there was still a sandwich in there from the do-gooder he met
that morning.

    “Will there be anything else?” asked the merchant.

    Without a moments hesitation, Larry went back to the rack
and grabbed three more bottles. He paid the merchant most of
the money he had collected that day and was on his way with
his haul for the day. As it stood, he had one dollar eighty-
five in change, one slightly stale sandwich, one loose
cigarette, an empty water bottle and six bottles of the ‘Sea
Shell Red’ sparkling wine.

    Larry entered through his secret passage into his home
and set up for the evening, making sure not to drop his bags
as he crawled through the window backwards onto the work
table. He tore the top of the water bottle to make a drinking
glass and filed it with his ambrosia. As he sat down with
wine in one hand, he noticed that he had forgotten his
sandwich which he had left over the other side of the room.
He placed his wine on the ground and walked towards his bag.
Once it was open he looked inside. The first thing that
caught his eye was the small medical kit. He took it out and
opened it. It contained several medical wipes and several
large bandages. Larry looked at his right hand that had been
balled in a fist since he left the library. With great pain
he loosened his fingers and inspected his palm. An open wound
was present, a shadow of his adventure in another world. Dry

Smith - Monsters in the Library - !17

blood around it, but it showed no signs of closing. He used
one of the wipes to disinfect the wound and placed a bandage
over his palm trying not to squirm too much from the pain.

    With that done, Larry retrieved his sandwich and sat back
down with his wine. He promised himself that he wouldn’t
drink too much that evening, but he had made similar promises
in the past and they rarely turned out to be true.

    “Cheers to the creators and cheers to another vanquished
foe. May they grant me the strength to fight until they are
all gone and my debt is paid,” Larry said with glass raised
to the heavens and with that he began a night of drinking and
merriment for tomorrow he would repeat the process all over
again.

THE END