A New Size in Library Management
by Ruairi MacInnes
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
The next day on the way to work, the gypsy woman was not there. Arthur muttered to himself, ‘I hope she’s got upset and gone and topped herself.’
When he arrived at the library, he made a beeline for his office because he was in an exceptionally bad mood that morning, having suffered insomnia most of the night after a memory he thought he had got over reappeared to haunt him.
It was that day decades ago, when his so-called bride-to-be hadn’t turned up at the church for their wedding. Later he heard she had met a musician, some bloke playing guitar at the venue for her hen night and she had eloped with him.
He tried to squeeze the memory flat as if it was a dead flower or a dead butterfly being pressed between the pages of a book before the book was safely shelved in a category labelled ‘The Unchangeable Past.’
He sighed. Why was life nothing much more than an endless stream of...
‘Hee hee hee hee!’
His meditations were swept away by a wave of laughter at the far side of the lending desk area, just beyond the line of vision afforded to him by the doorway of his office.
Stealthily he rose to his feet, took a few silent steps forward and craned around the edge of his office door.
His blood pressure rose as he saw the hippie trainee librarian with one of the permanent staff members, a Scottish bloke called Graeme who thought he was the bee’s knees because he had a weekend job as a hang-gliding instructor.
Graeme was smiling and the trainee laughing as she said, ‘You’ll have to take me up for a ride sometime.’
‘Ahem!’
Arthur cleared his throat noisily and the two younger librarians turned and fell silent and solemn. Graeme said, ‘I’d better go and finish the reshelving I was in the middle of.’ And he hurried away from the lending desk.
Arthur silently acknowledged that Graeme was a hard worker, but that didn’t mean that Arthur woudn’t be keeping Graeme and the trainee under surveillance. Their attitude laid grounds for reasonable suspicion that further bad behaviour was on its way. Still around the corner but not very far around it.
Later that afternoon, Arthur found himself vomiting copiously into a toilet bowl for several minutes. He flushed the toilet and propped himself against the cubicle wall, feeling faint. He wondered if he was going to collapse.
However he pulled himself together, took several deep breaths and stood upright. Tasting crumbs of vomit in his mouth, he mumbled to himself, ‘How dare they... in a place of books and learning... with the public nearby... this is a library... not a damned whorehouse! Any decent, sensitive person would react as I did.’
When he had gone to use the gents lavatories, Arthur had heard strange noises coming from one of the cubicles. He had secreted himself in the the adjoining cubicle, leaving the door slightly ajar, and cupped his ear against the dividing wall.
At first he could not believe the sounds might be what he suspected they were. But when he heard the door being unbolted and he peered through the space created by the slightly open door of his cubicle he witnessed Graeme and the trainee emerging together.
His worst suspicions were confirmed. They were so caught up in the moment and in a hurry to leave that they never noticed Arthur lurking inches away from them. He knew that was fortunate because it would prevent them linking their forthcoming punishment to him in any way.
Arthur spent the rest of the day in such a bad mood that he broke one of his cardinal rules and made a phone call unrelated to his library duties.
He phoned London Transport and told them there was a gypsy woman at the station entrance who was pickpocketing from passengers. He smirked. She probably really needed that money, so she would feel the pinch.
As for the two nymphomaniacs, he had a more elaborate plan in store for them.
The following week, Hermione, the head librarian, was enjoying checking her stocks and shares online while sipping a glass of decent Merlot. She had Sharps Extra Strong Mints at the ready to disguise any hint of alcohol on her breath. Meanwhile, a Chopin track played soothingly in the background.
Her tranquility was shattered as a pounding on the door of her office seemed in danger of breaking the door. She switched off the music, popped a mint in her mouth and shrieked, ‘Who’s that?!’ She stood up awkwardly, wondering whether to call the police.
‘Let me in! I’m injured. Graeme tried to kill me!’
Hermione pressed a switch on her desk, and the door opened and Arthur collapsed into the room. His usual white shirt was splattered in blood. He was rolling around the floor while groaning in pain.
‘Don’t move, I’m calling an ambulance.’
Later, when she telephoned the hospital to ask about Arthur, they told her it had looked worse than it was. The patient had been cut with a sharp implement but the bleeding was profuse enough to indicate some degree of haemophilia, a condition which the patient said he was unaware of so perhaps a late-onset haemophiliac condition.
They would carry out some tests on him but in the meantime his wound had been stitched up and Arthur had been discharged.
When Graeme was taken into custody for questioning by the police, he professed complete ignorance of what the police were talking about. But they had found traces of Arthur’s blood on Graeme’s shirt. Graeme had said it was a mystery to him how that got there.
Even when a ceremonial Scottish knife, a skean dhu, was found in his desk drawer with Arthur’s blood on it, Graeme could only respond that he didn’t understand how it had ended up there.
The police asked him if there was any animosity between him and Arthur, and he admitted that he thought the man was a bullying creep but he insisted he had always behaved professionally towards Arthur.
Despite his protests of innocence, Graeme was suspended from library duties pending further police enquiries.
When Arthur got back home from the hospital, he made the taxi driver turn the vehicle into the narrow street to drop him off on the kerb precisely outside his front door. But he did not give the driver a tip, because he was convinced that taxi drivers got too much money for essentially just driving around and having a nice time.
The first thing he did was make himself a lovely cup of cocoa and then he kicked back on the leather sofa and congratulated himself on how perfectly he had executed the plan.
He replayed the plan in his mind, savouring every detail. For several evenings at home, Arthur had transfused blood from his arm into plastic sachets so that he had enough blood for the task.
He had got the idea from a crime film he had seen, and he had educated himself on the technical details at a specialist medical library in London, then bought the necessary equipment online.
The blood-filled sachets were kept fresh in Arthur’s fridge. At the weekend, he had purchased a ceremonial skean dhu in a Scottish gift shop.
In addition, he had bought a second skean dhu from another shop, because buying two knives from the same shop would have flagged him in the shopkeeper’s memory.
Once he was back at the library, he had dripped a few spots of his transfused blood onto one of the knives and hidden it under some papers at the back of a drawer in Graeme’s desk. Even if Graeme opened the drawer briefly, he would never notice the knife. The fact the knife was hidden would help to convince the police of Graeme’s guilt.
After that, he had smeared some of the blood onto his own hand. He waited till Graeme was standing behind the lending desk then Arthur edged past him. Surreptitiously, he had brushed the blood onto Graeme’s shirt while loudly saying, ‘Let me just squeeze past you, Graeme mate.’
Next he had concealed himself in a toilet cubicle and had used the second knife to cut himself, though not deeply, and he had splashed the rest of the transfused blood onto his white shirt to make the injury look serious.
On the way to Hermione’s office, he had dropped the second knife out of a window and into a huge rubbish bin outside the library, the sliding cover of which he had previously propped open with a stick.
He knew the bin would be removed later that day and its contents added to a giant inner city rubbish mound where it would take months to be found, if at all.
Finally, he had run into Hermione’s office and acted so convincingly that he felt he deserved an Oscar.
After a week off work, Arthur told Hermione he was ready to return. He had taught Graeme a valuable lesson about the consequence of promiscuity. If anything, the man ought to be grateful.
On the first day of his return to work, as he left the station he was gratified to see that the fortune teller had not returned. ‘One problem less,’ thought Arthur happily.
However when he arrived at the library and approached his office, almost immediately his brief mood of serenity was shattered. A butterfly was flying around the lending desk area in a seemingly random manner.
Arthur hated the way it was fluttering around without a care in the world. The way it displayed its brightly coloured wings, for all to see, reeked of vanity and shamelessness. It was clearly looking for another butterfly to mate with. Did it think the library, a place of serious study, was its pleasure den?
He felt his blood pressure rising; he unlocked his office, dashed inside and rummaged in the drawers of his desk for some fly spray as he started planning how to capture the butterfly so that he could punish it for being so obsessed with sex. He would tear its wings off.
‘Could I have a cup of tea and a chocolate donut please?’
A woman’s loud voice rang out across the lending desk area and into Arthur’s office.
Outraged by the idiocy of some people, he paused his search for fly spray and slowly he looked up to ascertain which insane member of the public dared to intrude on his domain and wind him up with some absurd request.
Smiling at him over the lending desk stood the gypsy woman.
Arthur almost threw up from a mixture of rage and anxiety. Caught in an overpowering haze of adrenaline, his knees buckled and he clutched at his office chair but managed to lever himself to his feet, and he stumbled forwards towards the woman, wishing he could press a button to make her disappear.
Somehow, using what he knew to be a heroic quantity of willpower, Arthur pulled himself together. His professional training kicked in. Pretending he had never seen the woman in his life, he said in his most booming, authoritarian and patronizing tones, ‘Madam...Shhhhhh! Keep your voice down. Do you not realize this is a library?’
The woman smiled sweetly and whispered, terribly quietly, almost inaudibly, ‘Oh sorry... Cup of tea and a chocolate donut, please.’
Arthur was paralyzed with rage. He could not move. He could not speak. Still smiling, the gypsy woman said, ‘Just teasing you to cheer you up, sweetheart.’
Carrying a large, old-fashioned handbag, she walked over to a chair and table, leaving the deputy head librarian mute with anger and wiping a sheen of sweat off his forehead with his handkerchief.
Arthur spent the remainder of the morning alone in his office with the door locked. Occasionally people knocked on his door or the phone rang. But he ignored these intrusions into his despair. He was angry and humiliated.
All his life he had tried to rebuild himself, create a wall around himself so he could not be hurt as he had been in the past. Then out of nowhere appeared this upstart, this fringe member of society to ridicule him.
It was too much. He couldn’t stand it. The problem required a solution. The solution was revenge.
Arthur’s introspection ceased as he noticed an unfamiliar object on his desk. A small, flattish container. He leaned over to examine it. A box of coloured crayons. How had they got there? Who had put them there?
But further enquiry was unnecessary. The crayons had given him an idea, a very brilliant idea.
Later on, Arthur studied the gypsy woman sitting at her table. She seemed to be on a mission to read every book in the library, he thought. All day, she had been going to and fro from her desk to the the bookshelves and back again, slowly but surely accumulating several stacks of books at her table. The stacks seemed mountainous to Arthur, and he contemplated bitterly the time required for reshelving them.
But her journeys away from her desk created the window of opportunity that Arthur needed. His brilliant idea would soon become reality.
Towards the end of the day, there was an announcement over the PA. ‘The library will be closing in fifteen minutes. Please take any books you wish to borrow to the lending desk.’
Julie, the trainee librarian, faltered slightly as she made the announcement. Arthur, the deputy head librarian, had asked her to stand in for him briefly, for he had an urgent task to attend to.
Though she was nervous about speaking over the PA, she was pleased. It would look great on her CV and she loved working in a library, even if the deputy head librarian was so very strange.
She knew Graeme wouldn’t have attacked him and, intuitively, she knew that Arthur was hiding the real events. But it was the police’s job to look into everything, and she would leave it to them.
She had already provided a witness statement, giving her 100 per cent positive opinion of Graeme’s character. That was all she could do.
At that point, her thoughts were interrupted as she recognized Arthur’s voice, and his voice was sounding pompous. ‘This way, officer. The suspect is over there.’
Julie watched with horrified fascination as Arthur led a middle-aged policeman and two younger policemen past the lending desk and across the library, the mini-procession winding its way between several desks where startled readers looked up and either stared at or looked away nervously from the policemen.
Arthur was now farther away from Julie, but she could still hear his loud and officious voice declaiming, ‘Be careful, gentlemen. As I told you before, she’s a gypsy and probably armed.’
The policemen halted around the woman’s table, and the senior officer said in a commanding voice, ‘Madam, you are being arrested for malicious damage to public property, namely six library books. You are also being arrested on suspicion of carrying a dangerous weapon with the intention of harming members of the general public.’
Arthur said excitedly, ‘Hanging’s too good for her!’
The senior officer turned to him and said, ‘Sir, please let us deal with this. I’m sure you’ve got work to be getting on with.’
As Arthur trudged back towards the lending desk, Julie noticed he looked a bit sad. Meanwhile, the policeman was cautioning the suspect: ‘You do not need to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and used as evidence against you. Madam, are you carrying any form of weapon or an object that may be used as...’
Julie was straining to hear the rest of the policeman’s words, but Arthur had already started ranting and obscuring all other sound. ‘Street trash coming in off the streets! Probably taking drugs in the toilets! Probably selling drugs in the library!’
Julie asked Arthur which books had been damaged, but he either didn’t hear her or he chose to ignore her and went back into his office.
Ensconced in his office, Arthur was in a complicated mood. That upstart policeman had been rude to him. An officer of the law should show more respect, he told himself. But Arthur was delighted that his plan had worked so easily, and the police had never even thought of questioning the veracity of his statement. He put his self-congratulation on hold when, through the pebbled glass of his office window, he spotted the uniforms of the exiting policemen.
He jumped up and dashed to his office door and opened it.
Hermione had made a rare excursion away from the comfort of her office and was watching the policemen escort the handcuffed woman out of the library. Hermione said, ‘Thank you, gentlemen, for attending to this matter so swiftly and efficiently. I’ll phone your chief inspector to say how pleased I am with your work and your discretion with any media enquiries.’
When the gypsy woman noticed Arthur, she smiled and said to him, ‘I’ll see you later.’ And she winked.
Arthur returned to his office and lovingly recalled the details of his latest act of creativity and he reflected on the fact that revenge was under-recognized as an art form.
After deactivating the CCTV, he had taken six books from the shelves and into his office. He had deployed the crayons that had appeared so conveniently on his desk, using them to deface the highly valuable books, some of them old and irreplaceable.
To his surprise and amusement, Arthur found it fun to make crayon drawings of naked men and women on the pages.
He felt terribly naughty as he drew breasts and nipples, penises and vaginas. In the back of his mind, a voice from another time whispered that daddy was going to spank his botty with the stick with nails in it if he got caught. But Arthur refused to let that curtail his fun.
The rest of his plan was easy to enact and merely entailed Arthur strolling innocently about the library until the gypsy woman vacated her desk, whereupon he had dropped the crayons into her handbag which, very trustingly he noticed, she had left open.
Shortly afterwards, he had hastened to the nearest police station with some mobile phone photos of the defaced books. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, he told himself. It had all seemed almost too easy.
And then, without warning, a blanket of darkness enclosed his head, cutting out all sound and light. The blanket was warm and moist like the air of a humid, starless summer night but transformed into something solid, something living.
He tried to scream, but his voice wouldn’t function and he couldn’t breathe and after that there was nothing.
Arthur woke in darkness. He smelt an odour that he recognised, that of dusty, yellowed paper and he guessed he was lying between the pages of a book.
He knew he had changed, been altered in some irreversible and horrendous manner. But he didn’t know how he had figured that out. He just knew that he knew.
Arthur did not feel afraid. Instead, an overwhelming sense of sadness suffused him. The ways of the world were frustratingly mysterious, he thought, even though he had devoted his life to striving for certainties and a set of logical rules.
However, his priority at this moment was the thirst he was experiencing. Instinctively he realized that, because of his transformation, he needed to drink blood to survive. But he was resting on cold, dead paper. Bloodless paper, bloodless ink.
And he was going to have to wait. And wait. And wait until someone picked up and opened the book inside of which he was trapped.
His librarian mind, which was still functioning despite being commingled with the mind of some other life form, regained control. The key question that would determine whether he lived or died was: HOW POPULAR IS THE BOOK I AM TRAPPED WITHIN?
He knew that if the book was an example of the pornographic trash he despised, such as Fifty Shades of Grey, then he probably had only hours to wait.
On the the other hand, the public would ignore a book of quality such as his personal favourite, My Life In Croquet, vol 2: The Middle Years by Belmont Frame. If he was in a tome similar to the latter, he might not get blood in time to survive.
He could not identify the book in which he reposed as there was not enough light filtering in to see clearly the printed letters and, anyway, the letters nearby him were too large to read.
At that instant, darkness was exchanged for light as a colossal slab rose away from Arthur’s huddled form, and he found that he could breathe with greater ease. Someone had opened the book and giant voices boomed around him.
‘Urgh... it’s a flea or a tick or something, but it’s got a creepy sort of face. It might have something we could catch. Graeme, you know what you should really do?’
‘It’s a tick. But don’t worry. I know exactly what I’ve got to do.’
Peering down at Arthur, grimacing in revulsion, were the features of two vast faces belonging to Graeme and Julie. And their voices sounded so resonant to Arthur because he was so minuscule. He clutched at the page beneath him, hoping not to fall off.
Could he leap quickly off the page and onto either of them and find warm and nutritious repast in their living blood? He was about to tell himself to keep his fingers crossed but suddenly realised that finger-crossing would never again feature in his life.
At that point and with no notice in advance, behind the pair of librarians there materialized the face of the gypsy woman. And, beyond her, were Mr S and the mother with her child who had drawn the picture of a boat. The gypsy woman said, ‘I told you I’d see you later, Mr Creepy Crawly! And thanks for giving me new customers.’
Arthur wondered what on earth she was on about.
She explained: ‘The folk you tormented in the library were so worried by the problems you created for them, like lost hearing aids, problems at school and trouble with the law, that they all came to me to find out what the future holds for them.’
Arthur listened, terrified, realising any notion of escape from someone so powerful was meaningless. The gypsy woman continued: ‘I told them they’d all be fine... as long as they allowed me to give them a little help. And a poor little spider I spoke with told me you had killed her colleague, the cockroach.’
Despite his sceptical attitude to the supernatural, Arthur had read enough history books to understand that people alleged to have supernatural powers were sometimes also reputed to communicate with animals.
‘It was the spider’s idea to turn you into a tick! Now it looks like you’re the one who’ll be working till you drop. And, by the way, these days it’s not “gypsy,” it’s “traveller”!’
And they all began to laugh at Arthur who, for the first time in decades, wanted to cry but discovered his tear ducts had ceased to exist.
Copyright © 2026 by Ruairi MacInnes
