Fading, Like the Stars

Rufus kept his promise, and two days later we were outside. The contrast was more than striking, after weeks spent sheltered under the ground. The very first thing that struck me, was the cold. I’d almost forgotten that it could be so cold out there.

“I’ve got half a mind to go back in there already,” I said. It was intended as a joke, but the way it came out made it seem very serious actually, and I think it did betray what I really felt at that moment.

Rufus didn’t laugh at that failed attempt of a joke, simply responding by a short nod of the head. Perhaps he was starting to realize how futile our insistence about going outside had been, perhaps he was starting to regret it, like I was close to. The frost was really biting, and the air was so sharp and cold that breathing felt unpleasant. I briefly envied Dan, and his decision to stay in the library.

“Well then…, what are we waiting for?” Rufus said, with an enthusiasm that I neither shared nor believed to be true.

He took the first few steps outside, and then waited for me to join him. The snow that had started falling shortly before we had arrived had intermittently continued to do so, and a rather thick layer now covered the ground as well as the trees and all the landmarks around us. It crunched under our feet as we walked. If I had to be honest, this was probably the worst winter that we’d had over the last ten years: it had come earlier than usual, it was colder, and there was more snow than last year and the year before, and the year before that. And if it wasn’t the worst winter in years, then it was certainly one of the worst. And yet it hadn’t actually felt like it was that terrible – at least not until now. I had known winters that had been much harsher on me. Compared to some, this winter was easy. Of course, there was little to compare with. This winter had been spent in the warmth and comfort of the library.

“So, what do we do now?” Rufus asked after a short silence.

It was true that we hadn’t really planned anything to do. We were craving for a bit of fresh air so much, that all the rest seemed secondary. But now, it seemed that we couldn’t really take a deep breath of fresh air, because the air around us was far too cold to inhale deeply. Still, despite the fact that the library was truly such a remarkable place, it was good to be out of it for an hour or so.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back. I could feel that my cheeks were already turning red from the cold, but gosh, it was so good to feel the wind on your face, even if that wind was freezing cold. “Perhaps we could go and see what these buildings over there are, exactly.”

It was very quiet outside. Very rarely, there was the sound that the wind made as it blew through the branches, and even more rarely, there was a bird that fluttered away. But that was all. There was no need to worry about being surprised by anyone. There was no one. We were completely alone, and everything was almost completely silent. We were alone, and thanks to that, also completely free of our moves, free to do whatever we wanted to do, or to go in whichever direction we chose to.

“Right, let’s go exploring round these parts,” Rufus agreed.

The buildings in question were those we had come across upon our arrival here, the ones that I had hesitated to attribute to a factory. And to be honest, I was itching to see them from a close and try to figure out what they were exactly.

It didn’t take us that long to reach it, though caution commanded that we were careful about what we were doing. Once we had reached the buildings, I could observe the remains a little more closely. Not that it helped me figure it out very much… The ruins were for the most part covered in snow. The walls were made of stone, but the stones had withered with time and weather and the lack of care, and the color of these stones was now a muddy sort of gray, blackened in spits by damp and moss and mushrooms of all sorts. There were some spots of brownish yellow left in a few places, too, and that seemed to be the clue that these walls hadn’t always had a dark color, that there had been a time when the building had to be quite impressive a sight to see.

In most parts, only the ground floor of the building remained, though there were some places where the walls were higher and revealed that there had been at least a first floor. Sadly, there were also places where the roof seemed to have brutally caved in, and had dragged the walls in its fall, leaving nothing more than a messy pile of stones and plaster, and even all of that was barely visible, under the snow. The walls were pierced with windows that had long since lost their glass. These windows had left rather large openings in the walls – and I remembered that it was the size of these openings that had been what had made me question my first idea to attribute the buildings to a factory.

We got inside the ruins though the opening left by one of those windows, since the spot where there had to be a door seemed to have long since crumbled down. None of us pointed out the fact that there was some very real danger in entering a completely derelict building, though it would have been a wise thing to do. There was always the risk – very real – of a fall, or of seeing an entire wall fall down on your head. But no one cared to mention that, either because we were too curious, or because we had seen so many things already that it didn’t seem that dangerous, in the end. There was also no agreement on the subject of getting in to actually explore the building from the inside. It was more of… a sort of tacit, mutual consent.

I got in first, and Rufus simply followed suite.

It wasn’t the first time that I entered an abandoned building, and I had expected to find what I had always found whenever I did that: a sort of frozen and minimalist version of what the place had been like when it was still in use. Here, there was nothing of that. I didn’t know what had happened here, but it was not as well-preserved as other places that I had seen. What was left of the ceiling had collapsed onto the ground, littering it with bits of plaster and beams and all things of that sort. There was nothing else that remained, absolutely nothing. No furniture of any kind, absolutely no sign of what the previous use of this building had been. Nature had invaded the place, too. There was dark-green ivy creeping up the inner walls, and there were even some leafless trees that had grown up in the rooms.

“Wow, not really what I’d thought we would find,” Rufus said, echoing my own thoughts. “How long do you think this place has been left like this?” he continued.

I had absolutely no idea, and I didn’t see how I could possibly guess. “Decades?” I hazarded, “A century? More? A long time anyway. What do you think it was used for?”

Rufus shrugged his shoulders and looked around for a moment. “I wouldn’t be able to tell,” he eventually answered.

There was something very desolate about the place, very sad. For a moment, we simply just stood there in silence, taking it all in. The place was just an empty shell. The outside was in a good enough state to give you a vague idea of what it could have been, but the inside, had been stripped of all essence. When I eventually moved, making a lot of noise in the silence all around, a black crow flew up from one of the trees, in a flutter of feathers, scaring the hell out of me. I sighed deeply, one hand on my chest.

“That frightened me,” I said with a silly little laugh because I wasn’t supposed to be scared by anything like that, I wasn’t supposed to be on edge when everything was alright.

We trudged through the ruins for half an hour or so, sometimes having to literally escalade mounts of debris. Sometimes we would come across oddities, like bits of broken mirrors or what looked like the remnants of a golden chandelier. The rooms were all big, though littered with dirt and snow, and most of them seemed to have those large windows. The more we saw of the place, the less likely it seemed that this could be attributed to a factory. But what was it then? What could it possibly have been?

“I think it might be time to get back,” Rufus suggested. I agreed, and followed back towards the hole through which we’d gotten in. I stopped halfway, though. There was something on a portion of wall that attracted my attention. “What is that?” I murmured absentmindedly, but Rufus heard it and turned back to come and see. The portion of wall that had attracted my attention was not big – about the size of my hand, and though it was withered by the weather, and a bit hidden by dirt, but still we could distinguish bits of, well, something like a landscape.

“Looks like a painting,” Rufus said, answering the question that I had mechanically asked out loud.

I looked at him. “I know it is a painting,” I groaned, “I was just wondering what it was doing there?”

“Probably decorating the walls,” he said, as if it was obvious.

“Yes, obviously. But doesn’t that bring even more questions? I mean, you can’t tell me that it was a house, because it’s way too big. Do you have any idea where we actually are?”

Rufus shook his head, and seemed a little annoyed that he didn’t know. “If you asked me, though,” he said, “this was abandoned long before we were born. Round the time of the Crisis, perhaps.”

I turned around slowly, looking at all that I could see of the building, and tried to imagine it with walls still intact and painted, with lights and mirrors. It was quite hard to picture it, seeing the state that it was now in, but even with the little that I could imagine of it, it must have been something to see.

“You know,” I mused after I had contemplated the whole thing for a moment, “the more I think about it, and the more I try to picture it, the less I think that this place was not really abandoned. I mean, look at it. These walls look much too solid for it to be in such a state only because of time. I think that time and weather received a little help from people. I think the place must have been destroyed, for some reason.”

Rufus seemed to think about it for a moment. “I’m ready to believe you on this,” he said, “though I’m not really sure why this is of any importance or interest to us.”

“I – I don’t know,” I mumbled. “But I sort of feel as if understanding this would help me understand all the rest that has happened in the world.” I was clearly trying to justify myself, although there was really no reason why I would have to, and I didn’t like that I had to do so.

“It might not even have been linked in any way,” Rufus – the voice of reason – said. “The destruction might date to ages before…”

I opened my mouth to protest, but then decided that it wasn’t worth wasting my time over this. But I was feeling slightly annoyed at Rufus for not taking an interest in it, and for contradicting me like he had done. I sighed. “You’re certainly right. Let’s go back now, it’s getting really cold.” Without waiting for an answer, I crossed the short distance that separated us from the hole in the wall and climbed through it.

It appeared that the walls that were still standing, even though they were severely damaged, had acted as a rather effective protection against the wind, because as soon as I was out in the open again, I was hit once again by the coldness of the wind.

“Just how long is this winter going to last, exactly?” I groaned, a little exasperated.

“Well…” Rufus began.

“No,” I cut, interrupting him, “don’t even answer that.”

From the look of things, we could expect another complete month of this. And I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not that also meant that we would have to stay at the library for all the duration of this winter, because that seemed to be quite a long moment. Unfortunately, it seemed unlikely for it to be otherwise. With such weather, the circus was probably in the very same condition as we were. There was a very big possibility that they were stranded somewhere, perhaps they were even still where we had left them, and the only thing that we could do then was to wait for the weather to become more clement. And that would take a while.

Snow started to fall again just before we got back to the library, in small flakes that almost graciously felt from the sky, but that made me shiver and wince as they fell on my neck and melted quickly. I didn’t like the snow. I didn’t like it when it was covering the ground, and I liked it even less when it fell from the sky. Snow had since long become a synonym of more difficulties and a harder time. I was used to from frown at the mere sight of it. But we didn’t – luckily – have to endure the snow very long. Soon we were at the little house, and almost immediately – like he had been waiting for us all the time – Arnaud come to open the door. And then there was the walk through the tunnels again, and again it seemed like a very strange journey to make, even though this time I knew where we were going.

As we were walking through the tunnels, I couldn’t help thinking that the next time we would be going through these again would be when we left the library, just as the next time that I could probably breathe fresh air would be when we would leave. The walk wasn’t very pleasant. The temperatures in there were cold, but just not cold enough to stop the snow that had fallen in our hair and on our clothes from melting. By the time we got in the library, both our hair and clothes were disagreeably wet.

“You’d better go and change,” Arnaud said kindly, “and while you’re doing that, I’ll get you something warm to drink.”

We thanked him, feeling relieved that he wasn’t angry at us for all the times we had insisted that he would let us go outside. The least I could say about it was that Arnaud hadn’t been very enthusiastic, upon hearing our demand. He’d even categorically refused, first. The safety of his installation was his main concern, and he did not really trust us to go out there on our own. It wasn’t very clear what he feared exactly, but it was very obvious that he did not think it safe to go outside when it was not absolutely necessary, only because we were tired of being stuck underground and wanted to be out in the open. But in the end, after having made us promise that we would take half a dozen precautions, he had agreed to let us go. Even if it was only reluctantly.

Finding our way through the many corridors of the library had once seemed like an impossible task, but after some time spent here, it seemed like a much easier thing. It was now very rare for me to get lost in the maze. I was beginning to see a sort of logic in the way all these corridors were organized, and I started to recognize strategic points. The library had not, after all, been built in a completely empiric way. There was a very strong organization behind this apparent maze. It just took a rather long time to see it.

On our way to the sector where all the bedrooms were located, we came across Cécile. She paused to ask us how our trip outside had been, but she didn’t stay very long. Pretty soon, she excused herself and she left us there. It was not strange in itself that Cécile was leaving so quickly, since she was so shy that it was hard to get her involved in long conversation. What was stranger was that she had cut short a conversation in which she genuinely seemed to have taken quite an interest. She’d asked us how it was outside, how it looked like with the snow, and I could swear that I had seen her eyes twinkle with interest. And then suddenly she’d said that she had to go and she had left us. I kept that thought in my mind as we walked on, replaying what had happened until my brow furrowed in annoyance.

“Do you think we should have asked her if she wanted to come with us?” I asked, “Cause I think that we should have.”

“What?” Rufus asked, “What are you talking about?” he seemed genuinely lost about this, having been too immerged in his own thoughts to see that the conversation that we had just had, had left me all thoughtful. That was something that was happening more and more, lately: Rufus being too caught up in his own thoughts to pay much attention to the rest. At first, I had wondered what troubled him, but now I was simply used to it, and did not even notice it that much.

“Cécile,” I clarified. “We should have asked if she wanted to come with us outside. We didn’t even think about asking her. We’ve asked Dan, but we didn’t even think about Cécile.”

Rufus winced in annoyance. “You’re right, we should have,” he said regretfully, “I hope she won’t go thinking that we didn’t want her with us, because I swear that I just absolutely didn’t think about asking her…”

“Yeah, I know. I completely forgot about her too.”

We were silent again until we reached the door of Rufus’ bedroom. At that point, he stopped and had a small smile. “I think we have time for a warm shower,” he said.

“No, we don’t. Arnaud’s waiting for us, it’d be rude,” I replied, rather coldly, and rather surprised to find that I was a little bitter about the lack of interest that Rufus had showed in the great building out there.

His smile immediately fell. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

“No, I just think that we should hurry, is all,” I answered in a miserable attempt to justify myself and to sound kinder.

We joined Arnaud only a few minutes later, and even the warm drinks didn’t help make the coldness that I suddenly felt, go away. The old man asked us a few questions about what we’d seen outside – was there anything that seemed out of the ordinary, any strange noise? – then it was just me and Rufus again.

“Shower?” Rufus offered again, raising his eyebrows in a questioning way.

“You go if you want. I got something that I want to ask Dan.” It wasn’t even that I was trying to find an excuse. There really was something that I wanted to ask Dan, though finding him was a lot trickier. I did, eventually. He was sitting in one of the rooms were there were only just books, doing nothing in particular. I sat down in the armchair facing the one that he was in.

“Dan?” I asked.

“Yes?” He didn’t seem particularly surprised that I was there.

“Could you tell me all that you know about the government, and how things became what they are, and… and about those who fight against it and what happens to them?”