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Piggy.2
continued from last week...
The door, upon further investigation was, in fact, sealed. Damn, this would make a good story. Maybe even fiction, which she had never thought of turning her hand towards, except occasionally in conversation.
Or so she thought, anyway. If you counted up the number of times she actually did employ fiction in conversation you'd have a significantly larger number than she would give if asked to hazard a guess. As you would with anyone, she would say. A touch defensively, but entirely right.
It just so happened that her use of fiction in conversation was much more interesting than most other people's.
She almost fish-mouthed it, thinking about how good a story this would make, because the little automatic filter part of her brain that kicked in and started embellishing stories was having trouble adding anything new to the present scenario without wrecking it.
To avoid prolonged fish-mouth, she pursed her lips and stood on her tiptoes, looking into the vent that she had a suspicion was making a sucking noise. As little bits of her hair came out of the intricate scaffolding of pins and elastic tying things that lay submerged in her hair like some really fiddly little reef, she leant in just one little bit further, before rocking back on to her heels. Yep, the air seemed to being sucked out of the room.
Her host, a recluse, living up here in the mountains and rumoured to have been carrying out some rather bizarre experiments on books was still stubbornly gone from the room. If he'd been in the room she'd have just assumed it was some sort of recluse thing, maybe rooms needed the air being sucked out every once in a while in the mountains due to... high altitude-dwelling parasites that abhorred, like Nature, a vacuum. Or something. At any rate, if he were in the damn room she could have asked him, but as he wasn't, she presumed this wasn't the case. You never knew about these mountain folk, though, they get up to all sorts of weird things, she'd heard. Or supposed, anyway, if she hadn't actually ever heard anything about mountain folk.
She backed away from the vent and the sealed door, back into the room that seemed to almost grow with books. For all she knew, the walls of the room were made up of books, and the chair she took a seat on in the far corner, well that seemed to largely composed of books. Organically so. She just couldn't tell where the books of the wall ended and where the chair, and the books that sat upon it began. She could tell which way was North, though, because there was a small bit of moss growing on one side of the chair.
And, since there was no use looking around the front room for an exit, as there clearly wasn't one (well, not one that wasn't sealed pretty well and truly shut), and the room she happened to be occupying was an almost living, breathing library, she didn't see the point in...
She stood up from the chair, looked at the moss, and then sat back down.
Then she stood up again, walked the step and a half across the room to shut the door to the Book Room, as she was now calling it in the version of the story in her head, stepped back to the chair and sat back down.
She wasn't sure, and she was willing to give it three or four hours, anyway, but she was almost sure there was the slightest hint of oxygen being given off by these piles and piles of books.
Lesson number one: You never know when a book (or tens of thousands of them mouldering away in a room) may save your life.
Possibly to be continued...
disclaimer:
So those software guys have us moving out, pulling up almost all stakes and hoffing it out to the west coast of the U S of A to do some digital sort of software-y sort of things with all the hip young kids.
Do people still make money doing that sort of thing? They're telling us they do, though we suspect they haven't the faintest, as they give half their software away, anyway.
We shall see, we shall see.
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