Necropolis

how many rooms there are and wouldn't even know how to count them." The Librarian gestured with one hand. "After you."
    "Where are we going?"
    "Well, since you're here, why don't we have a look at your life? Aren't you curious?"
    "Not really."
    "Let's see…"

    ***
    We went through the door, and for all I knew at that moment, we crossed twenty miles to the other side of the city. We found ourselves in a chamber that was certainly very different from the one we had left, with plate-glass windows all around us, held in place by a latticework of steel supports. Maybe this was one of the airport terminals I had seen. The books here were on metal shelves, each one with a narrow walkway and a circular platform that moved up and down like an elevator but with no cables, no pistons, no obvious means of support.
    We went up six levels and shuffled along the ledge with a railing on one side, the books on the other.
    "Matt Freeman…Matt Freeman…" The Librarian muttered my name as we went.
    "Are they in alphabetical order?" I asked. All the volumes looked the same except that some were thicker than others. I couldn't see any names or titles.
    "No. It's more complicated than that."
    I looked back at the door that we'd come through. It was now below and behind us. "How do the doors work?" I asked.
    "How do you mean?"
    "How do you know where they'll take you?"
    He stopped and turned to look at me. "If you just wander through them, they'll take you anywhere," he said. "But if you know exactly where you want to go, that's where they'll take you."
    "Can anyone use them?"
    "The doors in your world were built just for the five of you."
    "What about Richard?"
    'You can each take a companion with you, if you're so minded. Just remember to decide where you're going before you step through or you could end up scattered all over the planet."
    We continued on our way, but after another couple of minutes, the Librarian suddenly stopped, reached up, and took out a book. "Here you are," he said. "This is you."
    I looked at the book suspiciously. Like all the others, it was oversize, bound in some gray fabric, old but perhaps never read. It looked more like a school book than a novel or a biography. I noticed that it had fewer pages than many of the others.

    "Is that it?" I asked.
    "Absolutely." The Librarian seemed disappointed that I wasn't more impressed.
    "That's my whole life?"
    "Yes."
    "My whole life up to now…"
    "Up to now and all the way to the end."
    The thought of that made my head swim. "Does it say when I die?"
    "The book is all about you, Matt," the Librarian explained patiently. "Inside its pages you will find everything you have ever done and everything you will do. Do you want to know when you next meet the Old Ones? You can read it here. And yes, it will tell you exactly when you will die and in what manner."
    "Are you telling me that someone has written down everything that happens to me before it happens?" I know that was exactly what he had just said, but I had to get my head around it.
    'Yes." He nodded.
    "Then that means that I've got no choice. Everything I do has already been decided."
    'Yes, Matt. But you have to remember, it was decided by you."
    "But my decisions don't mean anything!" I pointed at the book, and suddenly I was beginning to hate the sight of it. "Whatever I do in my life, the end is still going to be the same. It's already been written."
    "Do you want to read it?" the Librarian asked.
    "No!" I shook my head. "Put it away. I don't want to see it."
    "That's your choice," the Librarian said with a sly smile. He slid the book back into the space it had come from. But I had one last question.
    "Who wrote the book?" I asked.

    "There is no author listed. All the books in the library are anonymous. That's one of the reasons why it makes them so hard to catalog."
    I was beginning to feel miserable. The dreamworld seemed to exist to help us, but every time we came here, it was simply confusing. Jamie and Pedro had both found this too. "You call yourself a librarian," I snapped at the man. "So why can't you be more helpful? Why don't you have any answers?"
    He tapped the spine of the book. "All the answers are here," he said. "But you just refused to look at them."
    "Then answer me this one question. Am I going to win or lose?"
    "Win or lose?"
    "Against the Old Ones." I swallowed. "Am I going to get killed?"
    "We are experiencing some turbulence…"
    The Librarian was still looking at me, but he hadn't spoken