From the Library of Jurgen Leitner (The Magnus Archives)

**Enter the library of an enigmatic collector, where occult books are guarded and researched at a fatal cost, with this uncanny eldritch horror novel from Nebula Award–winning author Premee Mohamed and The Magnus Archives’ Jonathan Sims.
**
Fear comes before the fall.

In the winding, perilous corridors of Jurgen Leitner’s private library, you never know what you’ll find. A starving cookbook. An ancient scroll that casts cool, predatory breezes. A cloth-bound hardback that compels you to DIG, DIG, DIG, DIG.

Free, these books are more than simply unnerving—they’re deadly. But the library keeps their dangers in check and their would-be readers safe. . . .

Or so Leitner claims.

For two of his employees, the risks are worth it. Hugh Franklin, research assistant, has finally found a place he belongs, where his skill in translation is valued, even if his employer is a bit odd. Sebastian Everett, acquisition specialist, can indulge his arcane ambitions, even if it means pretending to care about Leitner’s mission.

Though their tenures at the library were years apart, Hugh and Sebastian’s stories unfold in parallel, and their footsteps echo down the same eerie aisles, caught in a web spun long before either ever heard the name “Jurgen Leitner.”

Will they find a way out . . . or will the library consume them before it’s too late?

Autorentext

Rusty Quill; Premee Mohamed with Jonathan Sims

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

The Library

July 1992

Hugh wanted to apologise. For what, exactly, he wasn’t sure; he hadn’t actually done anything yet. Maybe he should be apologising for that?

He tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry and his throat clicked every time he swallowed. That would be on the recording—the microphone in here was very sensitive—and one of the other assistants would have to clean up the audio, which took hours as it was.

He swallowed again: *click.
*
Somewhere in the ceiling the PA snorted into life, so he was not totally surprised when a fussy baritone voice said, “Sometime this century perhaps, Mr. Franklin?”

“Sorry. Sorry. Just . . . is it already recording?”

“Yes.”

Hugh rasped his tongue over his teeth. He would have traded his soul for a cup of tea, but directly in front of him was the only extraneous object in the otherwise featureless room: an enormous sign on a sheet of foam-board reading NO FOOD OR DRINK PERMITTED.

Of course not. The books were delicate and valuable and irreplaceable; some of them could not even be handled anymore, lest they crumble apart. And this one wasn’t even technically a book.

The scroll he had been tasked with translating was still mostly rolled up, with the top part of the manuscript gently clamped under a sheet of Plexiglas. The remainder was nestled into a new acid-free cardboard box that now perched on the ledge of the draughtsman’s desk. The PA was silent, but he still seemed to hear his employer’s impatient breath over it, feel the piercing blue gaze through the camera perched over the desk.

Before anything else, though, there was the little ceremony—the necessary precursor, like making sure you had the marriage license before the wedding. Hugh opened the envelope leaning against the cardboard box and extracted the slip of paper within, then used the tiny brush-tipped squeeze bottle of acid-free glue to adhere it to the scroll. There:

FROM THE LIBRARY OF JURGEN LEITNER

And now the rest could begin, whatever the rest turned out to be.

At least this one was in standard Latin, thank God. “No date listed in this section,” Hugh said, and cleared his throat. It was always a push, forcing himself to go on past this point. Every single time.

They were waiting. Why was he so nervous? It was just translation, and that was one of the few things no one could deny he was good at. And despite everything he had seen here—and his employer’s warnings about worse—he hadn’t experienced anything yet. Still, it gave him pause; the warnings wouldn’t be necessary if there wasn’t some kind of backstory, like the DO NOT USE IN BATH labels they put on hair-dryers now.

He’s waiting, Hugh reminded himself. *Go on, do your damn job. What did you think you were hired for, your sparkling personality?
*
He began to read, translating as he went. “May the good Lord keep me,” he said, his voice trembling, “and preserve me from harm as I bring forth this work from the darkness to the light.”

He paused, hunting for the minute but detectable spaces between the words. He could not fault the monks for trying to use their paper efficiently—the stuff wasn’t cheap, after all—but he resented them very slightly for not giving at least a tiny bit more consideration towards the comfort of future translators. A faint breeze sprang up inside the room, not blowing on his face but around the desk, like a small animal pacing in measured steps. There was a new smell, too, cool and flinty, erasing the usual odour of ancient paper. Was that something? Did it count as something? Or was it—

Hugh paused, but the smell and the breeze were gone, if they were ever truly there. He waited for something else to happen, and when it didn’t, resumed, moving his finger along the sharp black text, his nose hovering an inch above the plastic. “Through the method of—Or, foreswearing? No, sorry. Through the mortification of my wretched body I—”

“Less of the editorialising, if you don’t mind,” the voice snapped. “We are attempting to be objective about this, Mr. Franklin. Precision is key.”

Hugh jerked upright. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Um . . . through the method of fasting and abjuration, for many days, I have heard clearly the voice of an angel. This angel did not give me his name, and I did not request it, being a lowly creature before him. And he did . . . he did instruct me . . . to write down all that he said . . . without changes.”

He reached the end of the section, lifted the Plexiglas and extruded more of the scroll from the box, then replaced the plastic to flatten it again. And then he blinked, reflexively, as if something had unexpectedly photographed him with flash. “I can keep reading the text,” he said uncertainly, “but there’s something missing here.”

“Missing?” the voice said.

“An illumination. It might be an initial. Or a full illustration . . .”

Hugh lowered his face again over the scroll, his fingertips absently worrying at its free edges, where the linen paper had softened with age into something that felt like skin. The missing piece was roughly rectangular, about the size of a matchbox, and its edges were sharp and crisp.

At a glance Hugh could not pinpoint who might have done it, or during which time period of the scroll’s long and checkered lifetime—medieval documents tended to change owners more than people thought—but the person had been extremely careful, removing the entire image. Perhaps it had been grangerised? It’d be curious for such an old text to fall victim to an eighteenth-century practice, which had usually involved relatively recent and therefore better-engraved art, but not unheard of. Nothing was unheard of when it came to old books. But it was very annoying to not know whether the missing illustration had been repurposed into another book, or if it’d merely been cut and saved in an archive of stolen illustrations. He wondered whether Leitner would ask him to try to track it down—an…