The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) by John Connolly Read Free Book Online Page A

see, and I found the man
at the bus stop quite fascinating. By the time he’d finished speaking, I was
convinced. I brought him back here and restored him to the safe care of the
librarian of the day. That was old Headley, my predecessor. I had a cup of tea
with him, much as we’re doing now, and that was the start of it. When Headley
retired, I took his place. Simple as that.”
    It didn’t strike Mr. Berger as very simple at all. It seemed
complicated on a quite cosmic scale.
    “Could I…?” Mr. Berger began to say, then stopped. It
struck him as a most extraordinary thing to ask, and he wasn’t sure that he
should.
    “See them?” said Mr. Gedeon. “By all means! Best bring your
coat, though. I find it can get a bit chilly back there.”
    Mr. Berger did as he was told. He put on his coat and
followed Mr. Gedeon past the shelves, his eyes taking in the titles as he went.
He wanted to touch the books, to take them down and stroke them like cats, but
he controlled the urge. After all, if Mr. Gedeon was to be believed, he was
about to have a far more extraordinary encounter with the world of books.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN
    In the end it proved to be slightly duller than Mr. Berger had expected. Each
of the characters had a small but clean suite of rooms, personalized to suit
their time periods and dispositions. Mr. Gedeon explained that they didn’t
organize the living areas by authors or periods of history, so there weren’t
entire wings devoted to Dickens or Shakespeare.
    “It just didn’t work when it was tried in the past,” said
Mr. Gedeon. “Worse, it caused terrible problems and some awful fights. The
characters tend to have a pretty good instinct for these things themselves, and
my inclination has always been to let them choose their own space.”
    They passed Room 221B, where Sherlock Holmes appeared to be
in an entirely drug-induced state of stupor, while in a nearby suite Tom Jones
was doing something unspeakable with Fanny Hill. There was a brooding
Heathcliff, and a Fagin with rope burns around his neck, but like animals in a
zoo, a lot of the characters were simply napping.
    “They do that a lot,” said Mr. Gedeon. “I’ve seen some of
them sleep for years, decades even. They don’t get hungry as such, although
they do like to eat to break the monotony. Force of habit, I suppose. We try to
keep them away from wine. That makes them rowdy.”
    “But do they realize that they’re fictional characters?”
said Mr. Berger.
    “Oh yes. Some of them take it better than others, but they
all learn to accept that their lives have been written by someone else, and
their memories are a product of literary invention, even if, as I said earlier,
it gets a bit more complicated with historical characters.”
    “But you said it was only fictional characters who ended up
here,” Mr. Berger protested.
    “That is the case as a rule, but it’s also true that some
historical characters become more real to us in their fictional forms. Take
Richard III: much of the public perception of him is a product of Shakespeare’s
play and Tudor propaganda, so in a sense that Richard III is a fictional
character. Our Richard III is aware that he’s not actually the Richard
III but a Richard III. On the other hand, as far as the public is
concerned he is the Richard III and is more real in their minds than any
products of later revisionism. But he’s the exception rather than the rule:
very few historical characters manage to make that transition. All for the
best, really, otherwise this place would be packed to the rafters.”
    Mr. Berger had wanted to raise the issue of space with the
librarian, and this seemed like the opportune moment.
    “I did notice that the building seems significantly larger
on the inside than on the outside,” he remarked.
    “It’s funny, that,” said Mr. Gedeon. “Doesn’t seem to matter
much what the building looks like on the outside: it’s as though, when they all
move in, they bring their