The Library

The pub was perfectly placed just near to a conference centre guaranteeing a regular crowd of new faces most nights, people away from home and looking for a good time. In addition it was dark and the CCTV covered just the till and the bar focused on preventing staff pilfering rather than customer safety.

He carried the two drinks back to the high table in the corner and put her prosecco onto the stained bar mat in front of her. He placed his own red wine on the table before seating himself.

She wasn’t stupid, she could see that feint lighter band of skin where his wedding ring should have been. She listened, apparently attentively, whilst letting her mind drift around the words he was saying. They laughed a few times and she revealed very little about herself. Finally he made the suggestion of ‘another drink here or shall we move on?’

‘I can read you like a book,’ she said

‘I doubt that,’ he smiled knowing the thoughts of what he would like to do to her were running through his head.

‘Why not come back to my place, it’s just round the corner?’

Gathering their belongings they pushed through the crowd that was growing more exuberant by the moment a nd made their way to the door and out into the cooler, quieter air of the street.

After a short walk they were stepping up a driveway to what must have been one of the oldest houses in the town. He found it hard to contain a ‘wow’ as she opened the door onto an impressive classic hallway.

She threw her coat and bag onto a central table and turned. ‘Wine?’

‘That would be great,’ he stumbled slightly thrown by the scale of the house.

‘Go through and make yourself at home,’ she pointed to a doorway and he tried to look casual as he walked over and stepped into the room. It was like being in a film set. He hadn’t realised he was staring open mouthed at one of the paintings until she had reappeared with drinks and asked ‘like it?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ he replied trying to regain some calmness and authority, ‘is the house yours?’ He turned to look at her taking his red wine from her outstretched arm.

‘It belonged to my Mum and Dad but now it’s mine.’ She loved calling them Mum and Dad knowing how much they hated the shortened form of the more formal and respectful ‘Mother and Father’ she had to call them when they were alive.

They sat on one of the sofas, raised glasses for a slightly awkward cheers. His mind was racing ahead to what he wanted to do to her. She had opened the painful memories of her life in this mausoleum. Her Father spent every day in his library, her mother in the garden or kitchen. Never together except for meals where words were frowned upon. Theirs was not the love she read about in the fairytale books she devoured. Long, painful, resentful, hateful silences not the joy that the heroes and heroines deserved. They both thought she was fanciful, a dreamer and spent their days trying to undermine her hope.

She heard him speaking and snapped back to the present. She could see he was beginning to get woozy. The drugs in his wine were taking affect. In a few moments she would propose that they move. ‘I can read you like a book’ she said again. His slurred reply told her it was time.

With the help of her arm he was able to stand and stumble out of the room back into hallway. He wasn’t so far gone that the fact they didn’t make to go up the stairs but rather to another room off the hallway surprised him.

Through droopy eyes he could see it was a large library. His eyes could just about focus on what seemed like a hospital gurney in the centre of the room. She was helping to take his clothes off and folding them neatly on a plastic sheet. She led him naked towards the trolley and helped him lie down. A part of his brain was letting him know that she was a ‘kinky one’.

His last memory was of a white hankie covering his mouth and nose before everything became dark.

Later, changed into her special clothes and with the instruments next to her she lifted a scalpel and quietly spoke, ‘I can read you like a book’.

Starting at the chest she peeled back leaves of skin, faced with the ribs she cut through the sternum and pushed back the covers, making sure not to damage the spine, to reveal the heart. Once again she was disappointed with the ending. His heart was not black, despite his clear wrongdoing, his infidelity his heart was not as the fairy tales had told her.

Slowly and carefully she gathered the plastic sheeting around the body and placed his folded clothes at his feet. She shuffled a clear body bag around him and zipped it up, pushed the trolley over to the bookshelves where she had fitted hooks and hung him up.

She pulled the trolley away from under him and let the body find its natural position alongside the others. On a new library card she wrote the initial of his first name ‘k’ neatly before placing it into one of the catalogue drawers.

A new clear plastic sheet was placed on the carpet and the trolley rolled back. As she wiped it down in case anything had leaked she looked at the row of bodies hanging in various stages of decomposition. There were now sixteen, all first editions and she wondered whether she should rearrange them in alphabetical order. After a moment she decided not to. It was somehow fitting that the shelf started ‘M’ and ‘D’ and that they were close together in death having avoided it in life.