B) Chapter 1

1
'But it's one minute past!'


'I'm sorry sir, rules are rules.'


'By my watch it's not even a whole minute!'


'But even by your watch it's past half eleven. As I said,
rules are rules.'


'You can't possibly fine me for that!'


'It's ?2.00' Richard Querulous sighed heavily as if he were
discharging some terribly burdensome duty. 'Short-loan books have to be
returned by half eleven the next day. The minimum charge is ?2.00, with
an extra ?2.00 being added every day after that to a maximum of ?16.
We've done this.'


'Well I think that's ridiculous, you can't charge me, come
on!' The by now irate student customer replied to him.


'I can charge you, and I am. You're welcome not to pay, but I
must tell you sir that if you do not pay then all Library services will
be withdrawn from you until you do so. Should you neither pay nor
return the book, then proceedings may be taken against
you.'


'Proceedings?' The customer, a first year student at the
university who was, judging by his attire clearly in the rugby team,
gulped.
'Yeah, small claims stuff y'know. Could get nasty though,' Richard
lied.
A few moments passed where the student stood fuming next to the returns
counter. Richard began to worry slightly that violence might follow,
but was confident that if it did the whole exercise would still have
been worth it. Then the tension broke when the student slammed down the
money onto the desk and stormed away. Richard could not help smiling at
his victory. 'Teach him to think he's fucking god' he muttered under
his breath. 'He won't try that again' he continued, fixing the
vanishing rugby player's back with a near superhumanly baleful stare
(and hoping he didn't for some reason turn around.)


This was Richard Querulous' life. A twenty-three year old
graduate trainee at the Purbury University Library, Richard took the
utmost pleasure in fining people for overdue books. It was the one of
the only parts of his day that gave him any real pleasure at all. Of
course he was most content when he did not have to bother serving the
customers and was deep down in the almost always deserted Stacks
shelving old books. The Stacks were what had attracted him to library
work. Dark, musty-smelling man-made caverns, lined with old and
forgotten tomes of wit and wisdom. He liked the smell of old books, and
liked the feeling of being surrounded by so much knowledge. He had
thought this a good reason to become a librarian. He was wrong. The job
bored him horribly, but still he stuck at it, partly because he knew
any job would bore him horribly and partly out of some self-indulgent
masochistic tendency of his. He also harboured secret hopes that the
work would eventually make him into a new Philip
Larkin.


The library itself was a pleasant enough environment to work
in. The exterior was very grand, all pillars and mock classical
architecture, but this only caused Richard to curse the number of steps
he had to walk up to get into the building. The interior had been
renovated and was quite modern, with the all the main collections in
the library on databases now and the whole system almost entirely
computerised. This made Richard's job much easier, but he had often
been heard to complain it made his presence practically redundant and
his work worthless. Most customers checked their books out and returned
them using the recently installed machines, and though Richard did not
miss the human interaction of manually checking books out, he did miss
the physical sensation of stamping. Even the most casual observer of
the human animal could tell by the mop of unattended brown hair, the
gaunt, sneering features and the contemptuous yet slightly fearful eyes
that he was not the kind of man who took much pleasure out of
life.


No other customers were approaching Richard for the moment,
and he began to drift off again and imagine he was back in the Stacks.
His quiet time did not last long however.


Just a few minutes later a heavy hardback slammed onto the
surface of the returns desk with a loud thud and woke the daydreaming
Richard out of his pleasant interior musings, dropping him headfirst
back into the frontline of library services.


'This book is a disgrace' A bald-headed moustachioed man
barked at him in a lupine rage.


'I'm sorry, um, this, what?'


'This book, the state of this book is disgusting. Do you not
care about the state of your books?'


Still trying to catch up with reality, Richard picked up the
book and surveyed it with attempted gravitas, but was fooling no-one.
It was a copy of Wyndham Lewis' The Childermass and it was in a state
of terrible disrepair. 'Looks ok to me' He ventured
timidly.


'Looks ok? Looks ok?' The moustachioed man growled. Pages
152-178 are completely missing, there are suspicious stains all over
pages 102-116, and there are even some rather offensive doodlings that
I do not care to mention.'


Richard looked up the missing pages, the man was right,
there was a large chunk ripped out. He was right about the stains too,
it looked as if someone had been doing some serious ear excavation and
had been caught without a tissue. A year ago and a committed
bibliophile such as Richard Querulous would have been horrified at such
a desecration, but he was rather desensitised nowadays especially when
it came to the library books. He seemed to be suffering from some kind
book-oriented form of compassion fatigue.


'I'm very sorry sir. Would you like a
refund?'


'Refund? On what?'


'N-no, no, I mean, sorry, I just?um' He had drifted off
again. Concentrating on serving the customers at the returns desk was
so hard, he longed to be back in the Stacks where he didn't have to
talk to anyone.


'Oh never mind, I don't have time for this.' The man barked
angrily before turning and walking out of the library. Richard watched
him go and sighed with a mixture of relief and abject misery. Stupid
bastard, he thought, and began considering an elaborate revenge.
Something struck him then, and his brow knotted in frustration. 'If you
don't care to mention them sir then how are we to discuss them?' That's
what he should have said! He sighed again, this time more heavily with
the terrible weight of another missed opportunity. Then he put the book
under the counter so he could show the level of damage to Janice, his
superior, later. In the meantime he filled in another minute by closing
his eyes and rubbing his hands over his face in a gesture of monumental
tiredness. When he had finished and opened his eyes again there was a
new customer, though this was one was of a different
sort.


The first thing that struck him was the smooth dark hair
that framed her face. It was a shade of black that would make the
midnight weep with envy. His pulse quickened dramatically as if a
starter gun had gone off and it was involved in a sprint race that the
rest of his body had not been informed about. Her skin was a flawless
soft pale white and her eyes a bold and exotic green that could
mesmerise with a mere glance. Richard felt a wave of desire flood his
body as he drank in her immense beauty. He found himself suddenly
grinning widely and even going so far as to stand up for her. She
smiled back at him and it made him ache for wanting her. Then she
handed him a large black hardback, turned, and walked away. He watched
her going, paying special attention to perfect oval shape of her
buttocks and their rhythmic, seductive movement beneath her jeans. He
sighed heavily to himself, lamenting with deep despair and awful angst
that he would never have a girl that good. Then he felt it necessary to
sit down again. He remained sitting down for some time.


When he had come to his senses once more he looked over the
book she had handed back. It was a large tome, possibly a journal
volume of some kind. He opened it up out of curiosity. It was called
'The New Eschatologist, Winter 2003.' Odd, he had never heard of it
before.
He found he could not stop thinking about the woman who had returned
the book and tried to imagine a scenario where they might meet again.
Perhaps she would come back and he would claim she had a fine to pay?
He would start off being all irate and self-righteous, claiming she was
highly overdue on many books from the library. She would protest her
innocence but be aroused by his sense of justice, and after checking
her details again he would find out he had made some silly mistake.
Perhaps there were two women with her name and he had got them mixed
up? He would be terribly apologetic and say: 'Is there any way I could
make it up to you? Perhaps over dinner?' And she would smile in a
knowing little way and say she'd love to. He continued to daydream
along those lines for the next half-hour, with the imagined situations
becoming more and more wildly implausible and less and less
innocent.


A rhythmic clicking noise woke Richard out of his reverie.
It was the unmistakeable sound of Janice approaching. A minute or two
later she waddled into view wearing what appeared to be a large pink
tablecloth that valiantly attempted to hide her rolls of fat, but like
all her other clothes was totally inadequate for the task. Richard had
never been able to figure out what exactly the instrument that made the
clicking sound was, but he had been reliably informed that she carried
it everywhere and it was for her anxiety. She couldn't go anywhere
without it. Richard sometimes wondered what would happen if she lost
it, but then it looked as if the device never left her hand day or
night. Janice said nothing for a while and just hovered around
Richard's chair like an enormous sweaty blimp. Was it time for his
lunch-break already?


'Lunch' she announced almost inaudibly. Richard nodded and
stood up, as he turned to walk away he thought about the green-eyed
woman, and, reaching back under the counter he picked up The New
Eschatologist and sidled away in the direction of the staff room. He
would tell Janice about the damaged Lewis novel later.


In the staff room Richard collapsed into an ancient arm-chair
and opened up the big black-bound tome. The first few pages were given
over to the book's contents, and there Richard found a long and very
curious list of chapter titles, which included such gems as:



Ernest Turner and the Escalator of Evisceration
The Ruining Rupture of Russell Grantham
Christine Mallard's own double Heart Attack
Ted Harvey's Last Gland


He decided to start at the beginning, and began sampling the
first few chapters of this evidently strange tome. He checked his
watch, he had an hour for lunch. After reading the first few chapters
he saw a familiar pattern emerging. Each chapter seemed to be
documenting the last six days in the lives of different people, all of
whom met their end in a grisly and unpleasant fashion at the end of the
story. Richard wondered who would write such a thing, and were these
stories real life or made up? They documented their protagonists'
painful deaths in minute and often visceral detail. Still, there was a
certain morbid thrill to be had from the stories, many of which were
very amusing in a grisly kind of way. He skipped ahead a couple of
hundred pages, and reached a chapter called 'The Hair-Razing end of
Raymond Sanchez' before he noticed his lunch-break was over and he had
to get back to work.