Jim shook his head. "Gone. Or it wasn't even there. Come on!"
They opened the door and stepped in.
They stopped.
The library deeps lay waiting for them.
Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the ni
ce old lady. Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, an oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices....
Will stared.
It was always a surprise--that old man, his work, his name.
That's Charles William Halloway, thought Will, not grandfather, not far-wandering, ancient uncle, as some might think, but ... my father.
So, looking back down the corridor, was Dad shocked to see he owned a son who visited this separate 20,000-fathoms-deep world? Dad always seemed stunned when Will rose up before him, as if they had met a lifetime ago and one had grown old while the other stayed young, and this fact stood between....
Far off, the old man smiled.
They approached each other, carefully.
"Is that you, Will? Grown an inch since this morning." Charles Halloway shifted his gaze. "Jim? Eyes darker, cheeks paler; you burn yourself at both ends, Jim?"
"Heck," said Jim.
"No such place as Heck. But hell's right here under 'A' for Alighieri."
"Allegory's beyond me," said Jim.
"How stupid of me," Dad laughed. "I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Dore, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here's souls sunk to their gills in slime. There's someone upside down, wrongside out."
"Boy howdy!" Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. "Got any dinosaur pictures?"
Dad shook his head. "That's over in the next aisle." He strolled them around and reached out. "Here we are: Pterodactyl, Kite of Destruction! Or what about Drums of Doom: The Saga of the Thunder Lizards! Pep you up, Jim?"
"I'm pepped!"
Dad winked at Will. Will winked back. They stood now, a boy with corn-colored hair and a man with moon-white hair, a boy with a summer-apple, a man with a winter-apple face. Dad, Dad, thought Will, why, why, he looks ... like me in a smashed mirror!
And suddenly Will remembered nights rising at two in the morning to go to the bathroom and spying across town to see that one single light in the high library window and know Dad had lingered on late murmuring and reading alone under these green jungle lamps. It made Will sad and funny to see that light, to know the old man--he stopped to change the word--his father, was here in all this shadow.
"Will," said the old man who was also a janitor who happened to be his father, "what about you?"
"Huh?" Will shook himself.
"You need a white-hat or a black-hat book?"
"Hats?" said Will.
"Well, Jim--" they perambulated, Dad running his fingers along the book spines--"he wears the black ten-gallon hats and reads books to fit. Middle name's Moriarty, right, Jim? Any day now he'll move up from Fu Manchu to Machiavelli here--medium-size dark fedora. Or over along to Dr. Faustus--extra large black Stetson. That leaves the white-hat boys to you, Will. Here's Gandhi. Next door is St. Thomas. And on the next level, well ... Buddha."
"You don't mind," said Will, "I'll settle for The Mysterious Island."
"What," asked Jim, scowling, "is all this talk about white and black hats?"
"Why--" Dad handed Jules Verne to Will--"it's just, a long time ago, I had to decide, myself, which color I'd wear."