The Florentine Part One

It’s unclear how this begins. There was a phonecall, which she stood up to collect, finding a rasping voice at the other end of the phone.

“Dr Gellas?”

“Speaking.”

“I believe my assistant spoke to you on the phone earlier, I’m phoning from Oighrig(SeeNoteOne).”

“What’s the book?”

“It’s not just one book. There’s a lot of them. It’s an archeological site.”

“I can evaluate two or three for you. Any more is going to take some time and I’m almost fully booked till Christmas.”

“Well, you’ll need to see anyway, if just for the sake of…well, just seeing this.”

The voice had a name, Dr Hartman, he gave her the contact and they arranged that she would fly out to the site the following week. Her interest was certainly tugged by his descriptions of what was out there.

The plans were completed and John signed off with a little more information on where she could stay and a decent place to eat.

“And, Dr Gellas, I don’t have to say this but, please…don’t mention this to anyone. You know how these stories can get out of control if they fall into the wrong hands.”


Cramped on the plane seat, ears buzzing from the engines a few feet away in the propplane gloom, she was tired and listless as the island loomed ahead. Its image juddered in the wind like some desert mirage, hidden by night.

The sand was soft as she stepped from the plane. Tents were billowing around the cracked hillside, white waves rolling up and over into the still. A man was waving from across the tall grass behind the shore.

Standing inside, she rubbed her nose of the salt spray over coffee.

“I can think of better places to be at this time of year.”

“Oh, I fully second that Dr Gellas. The British(SeeNoteTwo) winters are never a good thing. Particularly here. But once you see what we have, then I’m sure you’ll realise this was worth the trip.”

“I’m starting to hope it’s a hot shower and the Algonquin hotel you’ve discovered.”

Hartman smirked a little. He had met her at a conference some years ago, a fascinating weekend in Vienna, finishing with a grand series of lectures on bookmarks and reading utensils from the early modern period onward. They had got on well, but he could not ajust to Gisine Gellas’ dry, acerbic wit, often misplaced, mistimed and misunderstood. He liked her; he knew she could be counted on to be quiet about this; he knew she would give a fair evaluation of this find. Above all, he wanted to impress her, he wanted to see her jaw come unstuck at the site of the library.

“So, what have you called me out here for? And made my bank account so happy about?”

“I think it’s best if we go have a look in the morning, mind you, the site is one of the only places that is safe when the winds get up like this.”

“Or you like keeping me in suspense for whatever reason.”

“That too.”


The morning was settled down by the grey light of a dawning somewhere hundreds of miles away in the east. She was one of the first up: the wind had slapped her tent throughout the night, providing a percussive howl. Gellas became aware of the large pitch around the base of the hill, hiding the dig. The scale of it became apparent in daylight, it was a truly remarkable structure, whatever lay underneath the morturary sheet that swamped it.

By noon, they were ready to go in. Hartman lifted the sheet and a few of his grad students made their way in, a collection of ragged and worn spectacles and unkempt hair. He gestured for her to follow.

A trench of twenty feet or so descended into the darkness. They followed it down, her hands flaking clay from the edges of the walls, banking a sharp turn into the further black of the left. They paused in the black while the lights came on, a scuffing sound in the silence.

The generator hocked and spat into life, revealing the site.

Before them stood a fronting for a grand building, much like those she had seen on classical temples or palaces, scarred out of the stone. It was paling grey and soft orange in flecks, impossibly tall, swept by pillars and the lapping lights of candles long since burned out. By a crouched doorway stood two giant figures: their two hands reaching into the eternal gloom.

“This is the library.”

She approached the figures by the door, gently, as if so not to wake them.

“Draugrs(SeeNoteThree) ” said Hartman.

Dr Gellas glanced up into their eyes, pained and vicious, flesh sloping from the tips of their fingers like waxen dribbles of grease.

“A Viking library?”

Hartman looked over at her. She did not break her fix on the statues.

“Should be, only the initial carbon dating told us otherwise. I had a machine flown in from London(SeeNoteFour) and the sample from the door told us it was older, much older in fact. I believe it’s an error: the cold seems to ruin everything electrical out here.”

“The door?”

“We had to break it down to get in. Couldn’t budge it any other way.”

Gisine raised an eyebrow. She was used to Hartman’s impatient badgering on the telephone every few weeks: she was a little surprised at his cavalier attitude to such an important site.

“Then how old did the test say it was?”

“Well, the wood was at least one hundred and twenty thousand years old. But that has to be an error ” his peeling English accent croaked.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well, the door can’t be that old! It’s impossible(SeeNoteFive)! ”

“And the notion of a Viking library buried under a hill somewhere in Scotland is plausible?(SeeNoteSix)”

She smirked. He shuddered.

“Can I go in?”

“Just prepare. Marcus, cap the lights inside. Just prepare, a few of us had agoraphobia(SeeNoteSeven)attacks when we set foot inside.

The lights spanned out before her in the darkened passage in a funereal procession.

“Be careful.”

They followed the lights down another forty feet or so, before reaching a spiral staircase. They traced its edge down in the dark, pushing against the walls for balance.

When they stepped through the doorway, she was surprised by the lack of light, yet all the while her eyes were blinded by the enormous spotlights propping up around the floor. As her eyes adjusted, she began to feel fear, for she could not see the ceiling.

The library was infinetly huge. The spot where she stood was a raised platform of slate: giving her a view of the thousands of bookshelves stacked on the floor, an unlikely number of shades, hues and bindings just within reach from the platform stairs. The whole room was a patchwork of colour, watched over by a vast circular stainglass window that must have be forty foot in diameter. While it was not light outside yet, it was clear that the room simply swallowed light into its vast heights, beams of sunlight could not have possibly swam amongst the rafters of the great room.

“It’s…beautiful.”

“Isn’t it?”

She stood in a quiet repose for several minutes, drifting across the endless titles from a great distance.

“Where is the window?”

“That’s one of many mysteries. Come down here.”

The students were setting up a complicated series of monitors and tripods over the ground below. She slinked down the stairs toward them.

“One of many mysteries about this place.”

Hartman was glowing now, his pride at his discovery overtaken by his delight at her bafflement: some sort of strange schadenfreud.

“There is a forty eight foot circular window that allows natural light in here, yet we cannot find a single trace of it from the outside.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s about as possible as the door. It’s about as possible as what we’re going to show you here.”

The monitor infront of the students bleeted: a tripod descended of its own accord into the ground.

“When we were in here for the first exploration, we found no stairs or doors other than the one we came through. We tried a sonic reading, but with all the stone bouncing things around, we got nothing, no estimate of how big this place actually is.

We tried to walk end to end in this room, but we realized after a while of walking that it was going to be larger than we thought. It must be the size of the whole hill we realized. So David here, began firing this device across the way, try and get a width of this room at least. We get different readings each time, which suggests there’s room behind the walls. That was before we found the stairs.”

“The stairs?”

While the students busied themselves, Hartman led Gellas by the arm over toward a dark corner behind the far shelves. His touch felt like a pincer in the crook of her arm.

“There. You might not see it: it’s some kind of optical illusion(SeeNoteEight). Means you can’t see it, unless you literally fall into it.”

He led them through.

“Look down there.”

She peered over the edge of a stone spiral staircase, similar to the one they had climbed down initially. There was infinite quiet.

“How far does it go down?”

“We’ve been down about 165 floors and there’s probably more.”

“How can that be?”

The students had completed the readings, Hartman peered at the screeds of data looking for something.

“The stone bounces everything around in here: you can never get any kind of reading.”

“165 floors?”

“Yes, probably more.”

“How tall are these floors?”

“They vary. Some are maybe twenty feet high, others are only about 10.”

“But right off, that makes this library bigger than…anywhere in the world.”

“It actually makes it deeper than the shelf the island sits on. It’s impossibly huge.”

“Every floor has books?”

“Yes.”

“Then how many books can there be?”

“Millions. Perhaps billions.”

She stood back while the team pushed buttons and prodded at the machinery. She looked around the library, floor to ceiling, door to window where the light began to creep through.

“Hartman?”

“Yes. Have you had a look at the books yet?”

“No, I don’t plan to just yet. This place is airtight?”

“I would doubt it. There wasn’t much of a problem with the air or smell when we came in. It’s rock, there’s bound to be cracks here and there.”

“And all these books are paper?”

“Yes. From what we’ve checked.”

“Then where’s the dust?”

The group looked up initially across the floor toward Gellas.

“I mean, if these books have been in here as long as we think and there’s light, fresh air, maybe a little moisture, why aren’t they decaying? And if there’s that many books, why aren’t we up to our necks in dust?”

She looked over at the group.

“Why is the place spotless?”

Hartman gazed across her from over his spectacles.

“Trust you.”

“What?”

“No, she had a point.”

The scruffy one with the long blond hair had spoken up.

“She’s right. Why is the place perfect? I mean, there’s no way it can be airtight and with the degredation of the books even if it was…”