Bulls in the Library

With any luck, no one would notice there had a robbery for a while. Max and Andrew had tried their best, and were finally able to get away from the party. Max thought Lord Duckworth’s manor was stunning, and would have liked to get lost in the corridors that wound around the central courtyard. Andrew was a bit less impressed by nature, he was set on the job at hand.

A magical book you say?

They had gone straight to Lord Duckworth’s private library, which lit up for them as soon as they walked in. Two chandeliers illuminated the long and narrow room, styled in the fashion of a few centuries before. There were pastoral paintings of farmlands and shepherds in the wilderness along long but short bookshelves. Between the paintings of Greek and Italian wilderness and the long dark wood shelves, there were several pars of animal statues, big enough to be seen from a distance, small enough to not get in the way of viewing the art above them. This was all except for the courtyard-looking wall, which had large gothic archways looking down on a moonlit pavilion and small pond in the heart of a garden.

‘Are you gonna keep looking outside or are you going to do this thing?’ Andrew said.

Max suddenly felt the tension in the air, ‘Ye-yes, sorry Andrew.’

‘I’ll check the right side, wall side you the left side, alright, Mackie?’

‘Fine, yes, good plan’.

‘No ... ya might get distracted with the view, we’ll swap’.

‘That’s fine, Andrew’.

‘Remember,’ Andrew said, ‘Al Azif’.

Max went left from the entrance, and started looking through the books. Guilt was already starting to build up within him. He should not have been doing this. But there was a big part of his soul that loved old books. Sir Duckworth’s family, well known for patronizing antiquarian societies across Great Britain, had amassed a huge cashe of rare and old books over the years. The youngest thing here must have came from the 1800s, and some of the books, or tomes, were codices from the medieval era. Max had never heard of some of them, there was something called ‘Commentarii de Punocis Fragmenta’ which seemed to be an analysis in Latin of some kind of fragments of papyri in another language. There was also a copy of the Guttenberg bible, and what looked like a Shakespeare First Folio.

‘This collection is priceless’ Max said.

‘What?’

‘This collection, there are books here that I have never heard of before, and if I haven’t heard of them, they must be extremely rare’.

‘Uh-huh,’ Andrew said, ‘Remember why you’re here, Mackie’.

Max stopped and looked in Andrew’s direction, ‘I mean it, we could make a lot of money stealing ... any of these books’.

Andrew stopped and glared at Max. Max felt like ice had overcame him.

‘Mackie, the book that we’re lookin’ for isn’t like any of the others. It’s worth so much more than anything else in here combined’.

‘Ok Andrew,’ Max said.

‘What’s with all these animal statues, aren’t they out of place or something?’

‘They are markers, separating different parts of the library. The Beowulf manuscript was organized like that, you know. It was placed under a statue of Emperor Vitellius, so the manuscript has Vitellius’ name in it, Cotton MS...’

‘Yeah,’ Andrew said, the word hung in the air and created a silence.

The two men continued to look through the books. Guilt was already. But he knew he had to stay focused. He had heard of the mysterious Al Azif over the years, but it was always vague references. No one quite knew its history, or what it was. It had been banned by Pope Gregory IX in the 13th century, and shows up along the possessions of a few strange names: John Dee a once famous English magician, Sven Orkettor, Johan von Wöllner. But other that, no one in the antiquarian community seemed to know a lot about it. Because of this, he doubted the book’s title would be included on the spine, like many other codices had (he was assuming it was a medieval codex). If Andrew was right, and the Al-Azif was a book about magic and forbidden knowledge, a book of magic, then it might have been interesting but he did not understand the obsession Andrew seemed to have with it. Or the huge amount of money he was paying Max to help him find and steal it.

‘Do’ya think there’ll be a clue to where it is in here?’ Andrew said.

‘Unlikely.’

‘Why?’

‘Lord Duckworth would already know where it is, I assume.’

‘You said it could have been a family possession?’

‘... true.’ Max said, and he looked around the room at the paintings. They were the usual Neo-classical and Romantic style artworks, depicting the lush scenes of life in the Arcadia where myths and legends are true.

He could not see anything. And walked along the walls looking intently at each scene. Few of the paintings had clearly visible people in them, which he guessed would be the way to communicate something in secret – like a shepherd pointing in a certain direction or something. There was nothing like that, nothing he could see anyway.

‘I do not see anything,’

‘Where ya’ lookin’?’

‘The artworks’.

‘There’s gotta be something else,’ Andrew said, and eyed the walls suspiciously. Max had to admit that as much as Andrew did make him nervous, he was very observant. Which was proven when he said ‘What about the statues?’

Max had not even thought about that. He looked at them. There were pairs of statues of chickens, cows, sheep, bulls, fish and other kinds of animals – they were certainly out of place in a room like this. Usually people like the Duckworth family wanted a sophisticated air in their private libraries, and have heads of the monarchs of England or the Roman emperors, or the Greco-Roman pantheon. Statues of animals was not normal.

‘The Al-Azif? Is it really as valuable as you said?’

‘Oh yes,’ Andrew said, nodding his head.

‘How valuble?’

‘People have killed for it.’

The way Andrew said that without emotion chilled Max to his soul.

‘What about the way they’re looking? The bulls?’

‘What?’ Max said, brought out of a daze, like a waking sleep.

‘Well, have ya’ noticed. Each pair of statues are looking away from each other – all except (and then he looked around the room again to make sure it was true) the bulls. They are looking toward each other. Now isn’t that strange?’

Max looked around the room himself and Andrew was right. It was the only pair in the entire room that were looking toward each other, all the others were looking in different directions. Some pairs were even placed far apart, while the two bulls were placed very close together. It was making enough space for one vertical line of books.

‘Well,’ Andrew said, ‘let’s check it out.’

They moved toward the twin bulls and looked at the thin line between the two bulls on the bookshelves. There were only a few books within that space, all of them obviously very old and caked with dust. They started pulling books out of the shelf and looking at them, although Max was not sure why he was doing it – only Max really knew what they were looking at. One book had complicated depictions of the human body with Greek writing in the margins, another was just blocks of Old English text.

When Max touched the book on the bottom shelf he knew it felt different, and when he tried to pull it out of the shelf he heard the clunking and clanking of some mechanical process starting up.

‘What’s going on?!’ Max heard Andrew shouting, and he looked up.

The bookshelves were opening inward like a set of double doors, breaking between two paintings. Inside was a dark room, and it was difficult to make out anything but a vague shape in the middle. Andrew stepped into the dark room, and clicked on a flashlight. In the small flashlight’s beam he could see a sort of display table, and inside it was what looked like an ancient book of impossibly old leaves. When they got closer, Max looked at the book – if it had a cover it had rotted away years ago, and the pages were so browned that he guessed it could even be from the early medieval era, at least.

Andrew, however, was looking elsewhere.

‘Look up,’ he said.

Max looked up. A giant statue of a bull was looking down at them. It was extremely well detailed, like it was copied from a living animal but it was made of some kind of stone.

‘That’s not somethin’ you see every day, eh?’

‘No it is not,’ Max said, ‘is that it?’

Andrew turned from the giant bull and looked down at the pages through the glass. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I .. can’t tell ya’,’ Andrew said, ‘Need help getting that open?’

‘If you please.’

Andrew slammed the flashlight down on the display table’s glass. Shattered fragments flew in every direction. There was no alarm sounding, however. It was hard to see anything in that room outside of the flashlight’s beam, but Max thought that the room they were in must have been closed off before the invention of electric lights. Sensitive alarms would simply not have been installed in there, maybe the current Lord Duckworth did not even know it existed.

But as soon as Max touched the book a strange green light lifted from off the page and flew up into the giant bull statue above them. They stood, transfixed by awe, as the colour of what at first looked like gray stone or marble in the darkness turned into the brown leather of genuine bull skin.

The bull began to breathe, and breathe hard. It was the near universal sign that an animal was furious and was about to attack.

Andrew and Max, still holding the book, turned and ran. They knew their lives depended on it.