The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) Read Online Free PDF

local
weekly paper, the Moreham & Glossom Advertiser , from the turn of the
century onward, he could find no reference to Caxton Library anywhere.
    It was already dark when he returned to his cottage. He
cooked himself an omelet and tried to read, but he was distracted by the fact
of the library’s apparent simultaneous existence and nonexistence. It was
there. It occupied a space in Glossom. It was a considerable building. Why,
then, had its presence in a small community passed relatively unnoticed and
unremarked for so long?
    The next day brought no more satisfaction. Calls to
booksellers and libraries, including to the grand old London Library and the
Cranston Library in Reigate, the oldest lending library in the country,
confirmed only a general ignorance of the Caxton. Finally, Mr. Berger found
himself talking to the British representative of the Special Libraries
Association, an organization of whose existence he had previously been unaware.
She promised to search their records but admitted that she had never heard of
the Caxton and would be surprised if anyone else had either, given that her own
knowledge of such matters was encyclopedic, a judgment that, after an hour-long
history of libraries in England, Mr. Berger was unwilling to doubt.
    Mr. Berger did consider that he might be mistaken about the
woman’s ultimate destination. There were other buildings in that part of town
in which she could have hidden herself to escape his notice, but the Caxton was
still the most likely place in which she might have sought refuge. Where else,
he thought, would a woman intent upon repeatedly reenacting the final moments
of Anna Karenina choose to hide but an old library?
    He made his decision before he went to bed that night. He
would become a detective of sorts and stake out Caxton Private Lending Library
& Book Depository for as long as it took for it to reveal its secrets to
him.

CHAPTER
EIGHT
    As Mr. Berger soon discovered, it was no easy business being a detective on a
stakeout. It was all very well for those chaps in books, who could sit in a car
or a restaurant and make observations about the world in a degree of comfort,
especially if they were in Los Angeles or somewhere else with a climate noted
for warmth and sunlight. It was quite another thing to hang around among
dilapidated buildings in a small English town on a cold, damp February day,
hoping that nobody one knew happened by or, worse, some passing busybody didn’t
take it upon himself to phone the police and report a loiterer. Mr. Berger
could just imagine Inspector Carswell smoking another cigarette and concluding
that he now most definitely had some form of lunatic on his hands.
    Thankfully, Mr. Berger found a sheltered space in the old
cooperage and chandlery that afforded a view of the end of the laneway through
a collapsed section of wall while allowing him to remain relatively concealed.
He had brought a blanket, a cushion, a flask of tea, some sandwiches and chocolate,
and two books, one of them a John Dickson Carr novel entitled The Crooked
Hinge , just to enter into the spirit of the thing, and the other Our
Mutual Friend , by Charles Dickens, the only Dickens he had yet to read. The
Crooked Hinge turned out to be rather good, if a little fantastical. Then
again, Mr. Berger considered, a tale of witchcraft and automatons was hardly
more outlandish than apparently witnessing the same woman attempt suicide
twice, the first time successfully and the second time less so.
    The day passed without incident. There was no activity in
the laneway, the rustle of the odd rat apart. Mr. Berger finished the Dickson
Carr and started the Dickens, which, being the author’s last completed novel,
meant that it was mature Dickens and hence rather difficult by the standards of Oliver Twist or The Pickwick Papers , requiring considerably more
patience and attention. When the light began to fade, Mr. Berger set aside the
book, unwilling to risk drawing attention by using