Chương 16: Inside the Reading Society

That night, the Reading Society building was even quieter than it had been during the day. The rain still clung to the street. Lamplight wavered in long streaks across the puddles, and people passing by kept their umbrellas low and walked quickly. During the day, he could blend in among tourists and café customers. A nighttime alley didn't allow that kind of excuse. Kichan stood in the alley behind the building.

The strap of the equipment bag bit into his shoulder blade, and the smell of rain-soaked brick pressed at the inside of his nose. Every time he took a step, the wake-up rod gave the faintest shift inside the bag. It was only after coming to London that he fully understood how thoroughly one solid iron bar could wear a person down. At this point, he thought it might make more sense to call it a shoulder rod instead of a wake-up rod, but he dropped the thought almost immediately. The name was already bad enough.

There was no need to make it worse. He stopped in front of the window he'd checked earlier. It was a low window at the back of the first floor. From outside, it looked like it belonged to a storage room or boiler room, and an old curtain had been drawn behind it. Moisture beaded along the frame. He couldn't see anything through the glass. Still, there was a smell drifting up from inside. Old wood, wet dust, and the faintest trace of paper. Kichan pressed his fingertips to the cold window frame.

The grain of the metal came to him. The small latch inside the frame, the rusted screws, the direction they would give if pressure was applied. It was much clearer than the sensation he'd probed from the café earlier that day. Maybe because he'd made the wake-up rod, metal felt less unfamiliar than it used to. If the grain of plants showed the direction they wanted to grow, the grain of metal showed the direction it could bear weight. Kichan held his breath. A car passed beyond the mouth of the alley.

The sound of tires slicing over wet road slipped between the narrow walls. He waited until the noise had fully faded. Then he moved one finger, just a little. Click. A small, dry sound came from inside the frame. Kichan froze exactly where he was. There was no response from inside the building. No footsteps, no voices, no alarm. Only then did he slowly push the window. The old wood had swollen from the rain and resisted a little. He started to apply more force, then stopped. If he shoved it, it would make noise.

He traced the grain of the metal again with his fingertips. The latch was open. The problem was the bent nail under the frame. He pressed lightly on the head of the nail. The damp wood gave with a low sound, almost like a groan. The window opened wide enough to fit a hand through. Kichan paused.

"This is a crime." The moment he said it, it somehow felt even later than it already was. Far too late for that line. He pushed the equipment bag in first. The moment it touched the floor inside, metal thudded dully. Kichan gritted his teeth. When he squeezed himself through, his shoulder caught on the frame and his wet coat scraped against the wooden edge. The instant his feet touched down, the smell of old dust rushed up at him. Inside was dark. He started to take out his phone, then stopped.

The screen would be too bright. Instead, he waited until his eyes adjusted to the streetlight filtering through the crack in the window. At first, the old room looked entirely black. After a while, the outlines of shelves, tables, and chairs slowly surfaced. Once he stepped farther in, the smell of old paper reached him first. Mixed with the smell of his wet coat and old timber, the room felt more honest than the lecture space upstairs had during the day.

The shelves held more occult commentaries than collected literature. On the table lay photocopies of worn documents, spread open and handled often. One corner of a page had been hastily tucked between books, as if someone had been reading it earlier and had left in a hurry. Clutching the equipment bag, Kichan scanned the room. Most of the English titles were long and unfriendly. He couldn't understand all of them, but his fingertips only reacted to certain documents. Voynich, Rohonc, Soyga, Loagaeth.

The papers were different, but those four names snagged on his fingertips in much the same way. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"So you really were all tied together." He muttered it under his breath. His fingertips brushed the corner of one old photocopy. The paper itself was ordinary. But the symbols printed on it were not. To his eyes they looked like scribbles, but the moment his fingertips touched them, something caught. It felt like a blocked threshold, exactly the sort of place where one wrong touch might open whatever lay beyond. Kichan stopped himself from looking any longer. Footsteps sounded from the hallway. One person.

Not a slow walk, and not an uncertain one either. Whoever it was, they knew the route. Kichan nearly dove under the table. Then he saw the equipment bag still in his own hand and gave up. With something this bulky, hiding under a table would only make him stand out more. Instead, he stepped into the shadow beside a bookshelf. He propped the bag upright next to his body. At that moment, one corner of the bag touched a chair leg. Tok. It was a tiny sound. But in the room at night, it was more than enough.

The footsteps stopped. Kichan could barely breathe. A man in a black suit stood in the doorway. He saw Kichan. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Then the man said,"You're in the wrong place." The sheer absurdity of the line almost made Kichan laugh. He held it back and blinked at the man with the blankest lost-tourist expression he could manage.

"Bathroom." The man's eyes narrowed.

"At this hour?"

"It was urgent." The man clearly didn't believe him, but he didn't reach for a radio right away either. Maybe he had written Kichan off as an irritating tourist. Kichan hunched his shoulders a little more. As long as he looked like a nuisance and a mistake, that was enough. Then the man's gaze dropped to the bag. That was it. Kichan knew it. The instant the man started reaching for his radio, Kichan let go of the bag's handle. The bag hit the floor, and at the same time the wake-up rod slid free.

The movement wasn't large. Kichan struck the inside of the man's wrist in one short motion. With a muffled thump, the radio dropped to the floor. The man doubled over from the pain, and Kichan immediately pressed the end of the wake-up rod under his shoulder. His father's words came back to him. Don't make it sharp. The man dropped to one knee without even managing a shout. Kichan didn't cover his mouth. Instead, he kept just enough distance to let the man breathe. He would be in pain.

He would have trouble standing. But he wouldn't be permanently broken. That was the line Kichan had set for himself. Of course, from the other man's perspective, it might not feel like a very meaningful distinction.

"I'm sorry." Kichan spoke in a very small voice.

"But your side came to my house first." He had no idea whether the man understood him. Kichan nudged the radio beneath a shelf with the tip of his shoe. The man was still breathing hard. Kichan eased him back into the shadow behind a chair and loosened his tie so it wouldn't tighten around his throat. It did feel ridiculous. An intruder was loosening a guard's tie for him. But he couldn't just leave him like that. Kichan stepped out into the hall. The reception desk he had seen earlier was dark now.

Portraits hung along the walls: a man with a moustache, a woman in a black dress, images that looked old but somehow also felt newly printed. Beneath them, a red carpet ran to the end of the corridor. Kichan kept the wake-up rod lowered. At the far end of the hallway stood an utterly ordinary bookshelf. It was so ordinary that it stood out. The shelf held sets of classical literature, and in the middle section sat a decorative clock.

It looked as if dust had gathered on it naturally, but the area around the handle was just a little too clean. Someone touched it often. Kichan stopped in front of it. His fingertips grew hot. What caught his senses first wasn't the shelf itself but the metal pins, the spring behind them, and the empty space continuing below. Inside the wall was a small, solid axle, and beneath the floor a rail carried the weight. He pressed the tip of the wake-up rod into a gap near the floor. Click.

The bookshelf slid open very slowly. Cold, stale air rose from the stairs leading down. The smell of paper, metal, and damp from a room kept sealed too long. The moment Kichan breathed it in, the grain he'd traced toward the safe from the café earlier became much clearer. Below the stairs, the place felt less like a reading society and more like something else entirely. There were bookshelves, yes, but the atmosphere was closer to a restricted archive or materials lab than a room where people actually read.

The basement was long and low. Old pipes and wiring tangled across the ceiling, and moisture had seeped into the walls. But the storage units farther inside were far too new. Metal drawers. Humidity control units. Thermometers. Security cameras. It looked less like a place preserving antique books and more like a lab handling hazardous materials. Kichan didn't like that at all.

The old books were old, and the Reading Society presented itself as elegant, but the place that really mattered had been sealed off with modern equipment. Hobby club on the outside, warehouse on the inside. If this was the Golden Dawn, then yes, this fit. Holding the wake-up rod low, he walked deeper inside. The concrete under his feet was faintly damp. Every time the soles of his shoes touched the floor, they made the smallest noise. Each time he heard it, Kichan stopped walking. Nothing came down from upstairs.

Instead, from deeper in the basement, there was only the low vibration of machinery breathing. At the first camera, he twisted the direction of the metal bracket and turned its head aside. With his fingertips, he found the tiny screws and pushed along the direction of the strain inside them. The lens wound up facing the wall. He had to stop before passing the second camera. Beneath the lens was a tiny red light. When Kichan moved closer, it blinked once.

He held his breath, raised the wake-up rod, then lowered it again. If he broke it, it would make noise. He had to get past it without breaking it. He set his fingertips against the wall. Metal piping, fasteners pinning down the wires, the thin axis supporting the camera. For a brief moment, he tipped all of them in one direction. The camera appeared not to move at all, but the focus inside the lens slipped out of alignment. The screen wouldn't capture Kichan. Or rather, it probably would.

But he would look less like a person than a momentary smear of shadow. Realizing that a beat later, Kichan stopped in place.

"Did I do that too?" The sprout mark on his fingertips didn't answer. He decided not to think about it any further. The more things he had to think about, the slower he moved. Two guards appeared in front of the inner door. Neither of them had guns. Instead, they carried short stun batons and riot sticks. For a moment, Kichan felt relieved. If it wasn't guns, then there was at least a little room for conversation. But the two guards already had the look of men who were done with conversation.

Kichan tightened his grip on the wake-up rod.