Disclaimer: Not mine.
Persecutory Delusions
Chapter 3: Substandard French Skills
The library stands out. It's not particularly big, or popular, or even made of shiny materials in day-glo colors, but it is still distinctly separate from the surrounding dens of politics and bureaucracy.
Some of it is the architecture: it is a single example of the pseudo-Greek pillars and carvings that architects fall back on when they want a building to look old and venerable. The library's surroundings, however, are either blatantly modern or blatantly late-nineteenth century.
The library may not have interesting statuary, but it's got books and internet access, and that's good enough for Skittery.
He climbs the sandstone steps with his eyes down turned, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. There is a reason he went to the downtown library instead of heading back for the suburbs.
In the suburban branch of the library, he is a regular. All the librarians know him by name. Downtown, he has anonymity. Skittery does not want people to know he's researching Them. If people can find out, then They can find out, and Skittery is certain that that would not be a good thing.
Inside the library, he goes immediately for the computers. Though books may be a more detailed resource, the computer is an easy starting point, so he figure's he'll begin at the beginning and use them.
That's when he notices the "Must Sign up for Computer Use in Advance" signs clinging to the monitors and decides that maybe he'll just stick to books.
The one downside to the downtown library's enormous collection is that it's very hard to find your way around. Skittery is looking for a general book on conspiracies, maybe some sort of encyclopedia, but where would that be? Reference? SF/Fantasy? Psychology? Guidebooks for the clinically insane? He doubt's there's a separate section for the last, though it does seem the most likely candidate.
Knowing modern society, of course, SF/Fantasy does seem likely. After all, none of the conspiracies are actually true, now are they?
All genres of fiction other than children's are crowded together into one room. A thin hallway leads from the entrance room to it and causes it to become decidedly isolated. The fiction room is neither as well lit as the rest of the library nor as often cleaned, so it has not lost that antique bookstore feeling all libraries seem to acquire whether or not it's intended.
Skittery turns down one of the aisles labeled "Science Fiction" and starts to look.
The going is slow. Most of the library's SF collection consists of space operas and Anne McCaffrey style science fantasy. The closest thing Skittery is able to find is the Illuminatus! Trilogy, and even that is not very helpful. After awhile, he sits down. Looking over the bottom rows is not easy when you're practically bent over double.
God. He knew it wouldn't be easy, but he didn't expect it to be this boring. He remembers back when going to the library was fun.
Skittery has begun to idly remove and replace books, just out of sheer mind-numbing boredom. The musty scent of old-books is going to his head, and things are beginning to get surreal. If his life were a movie, Skittery is sure that the sound track would be playing New Agey trance music around now.
Or possibly random banjo music, because the movie industry is just that weird these days.
Skittery is so wound up in his sage thoughts of wisdom that he barely notices the books he's picking up. Until, of course, he manages to dislodge one that sends half the shelf sliding.
He is so distracted by the tide of books he's dislodged that he doesn't notice the human
form that ghosts by the aisle he's in, pausing for only half a second.
"Shit!" Skittery yelps as he pushes himself away from the avalanche of books. Great, now he has to either put all of them away or risk the librarians hating him forever. And it's not a good thing when librarians hate you, as Skittery knows very well.
He begins to arrange the fallen literature in some semblance of order. It was a shelf he'd already looked at, so most of the books are familiar to him.
And then his hand brushes dry leather, a strange contrast to the other, paperbound books.
Skittery looks down. He has definitely not seen this before. The new book is relatively thin. He estimates it to be only around a hundred pages long. The leather that binds it is old and faint cracks can be seen across its deep red surface. There is no title printed on the outside, and a faded black ribbon attached to the binding serves as a page-marker. As lovely as it is, though, something seems to be missing. Skittery figures that it's probably just his paranoia acting up and gently flips the cover open.
The pages are yellowed to the shade of parchment, though they are far thinner than parchment could ever be. They are so thin, in fact, that they remind Skittery of an old bible.
He turns past the first few blank protection pages in an attempt to find the title.
It is printed in coal black ink. The letters are raised slightly from the page. The typeface has the clear simplicity of most early serif fonts. It is not at all faded. There is only one real problem with the book.
Skittery's French is less than stellar.
Back in middle-school, Skittery signed up for French, and he's taken it since seventh grade. However, his school's language program does not exactly rate best in the state, and even so it has never been one of his best subjects.
"Le mémoire de Thierry Quereux au sujet du culte de la nuit," the title reads, "Et sa recontre avec le mal foncé."
That is quite clear, even to Skittery's mostly untrained eye.
"Thierry Quereux's report on the subject of the cult of the night and his encounter with the dark evil."
Underneath it, though, is quite a bit of fine print which Skittery cannot hope to read. Rather than straining his mind with a language he does not speak, he contemplates the title.
It seems promising. The cult of the night? The shadow-creatures are dark as night. And "dark evil" is certainly descriptive of them, as well. He may be onto something here.
Then again, he was barely able to translate the title, so how is he supposed to read the rest of it? He is not going to ask someone to translate it for him. There's no one he trusts enough.
Snitch had taken French as well, and had been much better at it than Skittery. If only he were here…
But Skittery is not going to go there. He's got a problem to work on here. His crazy best friend can wait for another time.
Looking at the book, Skittery realizes what it is missing: a library barcode. He guesses he's not checking it out, then. But he's not going to leave without it. It could be important.
Well, it is quite a small book. So much so that it could easily get lost in the folds of one's coat. Maybe one would even conveniently forget about it and just walk out the door with it.
And what a tragedy that would be, Skittery thinks as he tucks the book into his pocket.
With le mémoire safely forgotten about, Skittery walks once more to the computers. He thinks he'd rather like to know who this Thierry Quereux is.
He can try the biography section while he waits for a free machine.
Just over an hour later, Skittery walks down the steps outside the library with only one additional book, a very thin volume on famous conspirologists.
He is definitely not also carrying a certain small, leather-bound book.
As Skittery nears the bottom of the steps, he stops suddenly.
He would like to go on, but he finds his way blocked by an ominous man in a black suit.
The man is tall, his shoulders broad. An aquiline nose dominates his face, and a black fedora dips over his forehead and follow the line of his nose, emphasizing its sharp, falcon-like pointedness. A pair of pitch-black sunglasses obscures the man's eyes.
"Excuse me," Skittery says, and tries to get out of the man's way.
It doesn't work.
"Hello, Alexander," The man says. A French accent hangs heavy on his voice.
Skittery does not ask how the man knows his name. He is too busy ignoring the reoccurrence of men-in-black in stories about the fierce interrogation of conspiracy victims. He wouldn't really like to be taken into custody by the government, thank you. Or tortured, come to think of it.
The man is still blocking Skittery's path, but now the aggressiveness of his movement is much more apparent.
"Or would you prefer to be called Skittery?" He asks, grinning predatorily.
"What do you want?" Skittery keeps the fear from his voice, but just barely.
"Simply to warn you, Skittery. Take care with that book," the man raises an eyebrow, "Or you may suffer the same fate as our poor, dear Thierry."
The man turns away and either loses himself in the crowd remarkably quickly or disappears into thin air.
Skittery walks home much more quickly than usual.
He is growing wary of the color black.
Once he is safely at home and out of the way of any strategically placed men-in-black or evil shadow-creatures, Skittery takes out the skinny conspirologist book. Thierry Quereux has only one short paragraph in the chapter on miscellaneous interesting figures.
"A native of France, Thierry Quereux actually spent most of his life in French-speaking Switzerland," the book reads, "His main occupation was printing, and he was only devoted to the science of conspirology in his spare time. However, due to his rather absurd theories, this may be a blessing to our Art rather than a curse. The man's most famous idea related to an organization that he called 'the Cult of the Night'. He hypothesized that a race of dark beings collectively referred to as the 'mal foncé' (dark evil, in English) hid in shadows and darkness, coming out only in order to wreak terror on our world. Further convoluting this theory was the notion that the beings fed on human dreams. Quereux was deemed clinically insane at the age of 33 and locked away in an institution. Two years later, he was found murdered and mutilated in his bed. He was not much of a loss."
Clinically insane.
So that's what the man-in-black meant.
Oh, shit. Skittery does not like where this is going at all. Maybe Blink was right. Maybe he is crazy.
Skittery very carefully takes le mémoire out of his pocket. Then, he walks over to his bookcase and tucks it behind the thick bible on the top shelf.
He is no longer very sure about its value.
Outside, the sun is creeping closer and closer to the horizon. If it were any earlier, Skittery would have gone outside and walked for a while. Just walked, and thought. Because God, did he have a lot to think about.
Skittery has seen things before. He has thought he was being followed, and all of that other cliché stuff you hear about paranoid people thinking. But at least those times he acknowledged that they probably weren't real.
Now… He can't help it. They're too solid to ignore. The man he saw today was real, that's for sure, and if he was then They are as well. But now he's discovered that these things he's been seeing were actually thought up by a clinically insane French guy with a printing press.
Skittery really wishes Snitch were here. He always was good to talk to about stuff like this.
On Sunday, Skittery does not walk to the factory, or even downtown. He is trying very hard not to think about Them, and it's mostly working. Sure They're still there, skulking in the back of his mind, but at least he's not obsessing.
Much.
The only thing about not focusing on Them is that Skittery can't remember how to focus on anything else. What is he supposed to do, if not researching Them or looking for Them or being chased by Them?
He wishes he could count the ceiling tiles, but his room doesn't have any.
After a few hours, when he's already gone through two books and half a movie that turned out to be so boring it wasn't worth it, Skittery resorts to cleaning of all things to keep himself busy and away from what he hopes are delusions. He's halfway through alphabetizing his bookshelf (and very carefully avoiding the bible on the top shelf) when he realizes that doing this means he's really insane.
That's when the phone rings.
So there is a God.
Skittery picks it up while it's less than halfway through its first ring.
"Hello?" He says.
"Hey," the phone responds, and falls quiet again. Skittery waits a few seconds and then rolls his eyes.
"What's up, Jack?" Skittery only knows one person who refuses to introduce himself on the phone to anyone short of government officials.
"Not much. You've been alphabetizing your bookshelf again, haven't you?"
"…So?" His friends know him too well.
"If you do not go outside and actually do something, I will personally eviscerate you with your own library card." Skittery almost laughs. Jack has always been creative with his insults.
"Do you even know what 'eviscerate' means?" Skittery asks him.
Jack sounds offended. "Of course I do. But that's beside the point."
"Right."
"We're coming to get you in ten minutes."
"…I see."
"If you stay inside any longer your skin is going to start catching on fire whenever you go out."
"Good-bye, Jack."
"See ya, Skitts."
Skittery hangs up.
He doesn't see why he's the insane one, when Jack is clearly in need of professional help.
He did have a point about the alphabetizing-bookcases thing, though. Skittery does that too much.
When the doorbell rings, Skittery drags himself doggedly downstairs. Though he's been bored out of his wits and preoccupied with delusions that he certainly does not still believe are real, he knows his friends too well to be particularly happy about this let's-save-Skittery-from-his-own-organizational-skills idea they've gotten.
It's all well and good until someone loses an eye.
No, really. Skittery remembers back when Kid Blink had still had depth perception.
But that's beside the point. As Skittery trudges across his front lawn and into the car where four of his friends are waiting, he tries to recall exactly why he's not doing something productive.
Oh, yeah. Psychosis.
The only seat left is between Mush and Blink in the back seat, but when Skittery gets there Mush quickly scoots over closer to Blink. Neither of them are exactly complaining about how close together they have to sit, and Skittery is just glad he isn't between them.
They drive for only two minutes before Skittery thinks of the obvious question that one should always ask before getting into a car with Skittery's friends.
"Where are we going, exactly?" He says.
Jack laughs.
Dear God. That is never a good sign. Skittery lets his forehead lean against the window, and wonders if maybe this is actually worse than obsessing about a French guy's visions of evil.
A/N: This is now officially the longest fic I have ever written. Whee!
volatile.virgin: That's alright, productivity is overrated. I'm edgy? Ah, cool, edgy is awesome. Thanks!
Brunette: Aw. I'm sorry you don't like slash. I'm glad that you like this enough to keep reading anyway, though.
Kid Blink's Dreamer: Thank you!
SBM: Why, thank you. Flow is my specialty.
Charlie Bird: Hee. You are hilarious, man. It's awesome. Try not to hurt yourself falling off chairs, though. Flattering as it is.
madmbuttefly: Thanks!
ellaeternity: Wonderbubbly? Best word ever. Seriously.