It was the quiet he enjoyed the most. The quiet and the solitude. Rarely did anyone come here to spend time among the old and dusty tomes that were kept here, because there was always something new and sparkly to play with. Those tablet things... whatever they were called. They could keep inventing new things, but they could never replace the feel of paper between one’s fingers, the softness of the page, the agelessness of the script. These books were where people’s feelings existed, where the thoughts and fears and hopes of their authors still lived, where you could get lost in the reams of ancient lore and never sense the passage of time. That was the other thing he enjoyed about this place. The feeling of being surrounded when he was, inherently, alone.
Not that he minded being alone. The tomes didn’t whisper behind their covers when he entered the room and couldn’t stop the impulse that drove him to open the door and close the door and open the door and close the door and open the door and close the door before he could even step across the threshold and again after he’d crossed it. The tomes didn’t give him odd looks when he couldn’t stop himself from placing a single book here, then doing it again, and doing it again. There was no one to tell him to knock off whatever it was he was doing, because it was annoying, never knowing that he couldn’t stop himself from doing it any more than he was doing it because he wanted to do it. Sometimes he could almost stop himself, but it was like crawling over broken glass naked and even though the end of the tunnel was in sight, North just couldn’t endure that kind of pain.
And he’d endured a lot of pain.
But this was a deeper pain than that. It was almost like it was ingrained into his being, his soul, his genetic code. He couldn’t deny it any more than he could deny that the sun rises and sets or that the world turned on its axis or that his best friend had a song about male genitalia and why it was so icky.
North ran his gloved hand over the cover of a thick tome that had just been returned, letting his fingers trace the embossed words in a strange caress. “Well,” he whispered, “I guess it’s time to return you to your home, huh? At least until someone actually decides they need you. Don’t know what for though, considering all things. But... paper trails, and all that.”
He picked up the tome and cradled it against his chest as he took it over to the cart that contained a dozen books just like the one in his arms, each one covering a different subject from history to botany to literature.
And, just like the dozen before, he was compelled to put the tome down, pick it up, put it down, pick it up, and put it down again.
Then the book stayed down, and North released a soft breath as the fire in his blood finally cooled enough to let him move beyond his spot on the collection room floor and out into the archive proper. The huge, circular, spacious room towered far above North’s head and was lit by artificial lights as well as decorative skylights. Each level of the main room contained a series of doors that led into different sections of the archive, and each section contained thousands of hours and reams of the knowledge that had been collected over the long years. More people milled about here, heading from one place to another, entering the archive or leaving it, taking with them a piece of knowledge or returning one they had borrowed.
North took a deep breath and pushed his cart out of the collection room, doing his best to ignore them all, instead focusing on the checklist in his mind:
One: Make the returns
Two: Find what people wanted to check out
He wasn’t sure if people were checking these things out for posterity or because they were genuinely interested in them, but in the end it didn’t matter, because his opinion didn’t count in this line of work. All the same, a stop by the front desk was required either way, so that was where North pushed his cart, doing his best to not make eye contact with anyone, since his eyes seemed to be the topic everyone wanted to talk about.
But he had to look up to retrieve his lists, so he did.
