Reproduced below is the fourteenth entry in the memoirs of Joseph De Ville, a 2nd-century traveler of Route 14. To view other excerpts from his memoirs, click here.

September 15, 102 AT

Stories do not die of natural causes. They are dismembered by censors, banished by governments, poisoned by interpolators, kidnapped by plagiarists, castrated by translators, prostituted by replication, asphyxiated by silence, executed by disinterest.

The seven stories we told told as we plunged through Library’s layers were more than the half-drunk ramblings of runaways. They were the swan songs of ill-fated pilgrims, the improvised elegies of doomed men in a dying world. There were no funerals for my fellow travelers, no clipped-out obituaries for their progeny to preserve in scrapbooks. Their stories are their only survivors.

Yet I cannot repeat them here, one after the other, as we told them in Library. They are too tedious for that, too disjointed. My readers will think them irrelevant. Instead, I will insert them into these memoirs where they lend the most context to my narrative, where they shed light on a character’s otherwise illogical decision, or explain why an especially unlikely event came to pass.

They are meager tributes to human lives. But this a meager place.

Besides, who am I to speak of tedium, of relevance — of readers? I am two yards of forgotten flesh at the brink of oblivion, pontificating to specters. Memories slip from my mind as sand from a clenched fist, lost to the wind unless I catch them in this tattered notebook.

This cruel place steals the best memories first. It burgles the idylls of youth, erases the passions of romance. It shanghais parents and disappears friends. It leaves only those remembrances which haunt, which shame, which torment — those memories which leech onto my consciousness, suckling at it like some zombifying parasite, gorging itself there until nothing remains for it to consume, finally dying, dragging me with it.

I remember verses. Verses from an ode I learned at Madame Griddle’s. Even now, even here, so many years later, they reverberate through the crumbling corridors of my memory:

Tonight! Tonight! New men tonight!
We’ll show them the road
On first sign of light.

If they should falter, fail or sway,
We’ll watch them collapse
And die and decay.

For us, the dying began in Library.

We should have seen it coming. The omens were literally written on the walls. Scrawled in gold leaf, rendered in brilliant color, etched in coldest iron.

Claude, having proposed the story-telling exercise to begin with, told his story first. It was masterfully delivered, full of self-deprecating humor and perfectly timed to begin and end with the first and final sips of our brandy. We all laughed and clinked glasses,  extolling the man’s performance. Then we descended to Library’s second level.

The mural we found there assaulted our mirth. Its centerpiece was a short wall in the middle of the room that depicted two jousters on horseback impaling each other upon their lances. These men were familiar to us: they were the Knight and the Squire from Chaucer’s troupe. Red paint was spattered across the floor below them, simulating blood. The rest of the pilgrims encircled the scene, mouths open in cheer, fists raised excitedly. The Pardoner and the Manciple were exchanging gold coins, settling some dark wager.

Chaucer was painted into a corner of the room, beside and behind the Miller so that the left side of his torso was hidden. He was staring in the direction of the jousters, his face contorted by the same grotesquely wide grin that had unnerved us earlier. But where half of this grin had been obscured on the level above, here the whole feature was visible, so hideous that our eyes were at once drawn to it and repulsed by it.

We then noticed the Miller, whose jaw hung open as if upon a broken hinge. The tip of a smoldering coulter protruded from his abdomen. The tip protruded, I thought. Meaning that he’d been run through from behind. My eyes flashed back to Chaucer’s maniacal visage, and I remembered his hidden left arm.

Clara screamed. In vacuum-like Library, forty feet underground, unadulterated by ambient noise, the pitch of her squeal nearly shattered our eardrums, and its echos seemed to carry on for centuries.

We all turned, surprised to find that she was gawking not at the skewered Miller, but at her own feet.

She had tracked blood across the floor.

Its source was immediately obvious; the spilled red at the foot of the jousters’ wall — what we had assumed was dry paint — had been wet. But how? Surely whatever it was would have dried in the days or months since anyone had last set foot in this place.

Reggie crouched beside Clara, dabbed a crooked finger into the ruby liquid, raised it to his nostrils, and touched it against his tongue. He did so swiftly, casually, like a gourmand sampling an obscure sauce. Several of the others bent their eyebrows; someone gasped. My stomach turned a little.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “It’s real blood.”

On instinct we scanned the room frantically, half-expecting a corpse to drop from the ceiling or a drooling lunatic to burst through a wall brandishing an axe. We searched surfaces and corners for hidden latches; we felt along the jousters’ wall for openings and edges. But we found no secret portals to alternate universes, no hidden compartments full of carnage. We were alone on Library’s second level.

“What if someone is below us,” asked Clara, “lying in wait in one of the deeper layers?” She was pointing at an iron book entitled The Man of Law’s Tale, which abutted a wall where a small rabbit was painted. The animal was standing on its hind legs, its head cocked to one side, studying the metal book with exaggerated curiosity.

We discussed Clara’s concern. It seemed valid enough, but after grappling for a few moments with the notion of a murderer lurking in the chambers below, our rational minds dismissed it, opting instead for a more palatable theory involving an animal that a recently departed band of pilgrims had slaughtered and eaten here.

An absurd rationalization, I realize now. An fear-induced trick of the mind, which defends itself against maddening possibilities.

We did have one objective reality in our favor, however: Firepower. Reggie and his shotgun were inseparable — though not so inseparable as Farmer as his prosthetic sickle — and God only knew what weapons Scia had grafted onto her person. Andrea and I wore revolvers. Claude carried no weapons per se, but he possessed a seemingly endless supply of bottles that he was likely to hurl at anyone who refused to tip a glass with him. If any threat awaited us below, we were more than prepared to meet it.

We resumed our merrymaking, having assuaged each others’ fears with talk of fish blood and ammunition. After Claude poured drinks, Clara surprised us for the second time that night by volunteering to tell the next tale.

We went on like this, drinking and storytelling and descending, until the sun set. Not the real sun. The real sun, oblivious to Library’s horrors, oblivious even to Earth’s death spiral, to the Chasm, to the Scourge, to the self-destructive, rapidly devolving race of barbarians that populated its third-nearest satellite — the real sun went on shining blithely somewhere a hundred feet above us.

The sun that set in Library was the false sun, Chaucer’s sun, the unnatural source of our light, and it moved across the ceiling and down the west wall as we opened books and descended staircases. On the sixth layer the sun had dipped beneath the simulated horizon. Yet there was light. It was an counterfeit gloaming, a crepuscular aftermath of amber and purple, and it emanated, faintly, impossibly, from the walls themselves. We inspected them for hidden bulbs or films, even putting Scia’s bionic eye to the task. But finding no such implements, we were left to conjecture that the paints themselves were somehow luminous.

The waning light in Library illuminated increasingly weird murals, each more disturbing than the last. They depicted perverse adaptations of the canonical Canterbury Tales, riddled with scenes of massacre and rape, painted in such grisly detail that the brandy churned in our stomachs as we beheld them. Where the actual Canterbury Tales killed off the occasional non-essential character, the variations on Library’s walls killed off the pilgrims themselves. In the Pardoner’s Tale, the three youths whose greed eventually led to their mutual murder were replaced by the Cook, the Franklin, and the Prioress. In the Man of Law’s Tale, Satan was pictured peering over the shoulder of a demoniac pilgrim — the leathery Shipman — as the latter thrust a blade between the spreadeagled legs of the Second Nun.

While the pilgrims brutalized each other, Chaucer stood somewhere in the background committing more subtle, but equally sinister crimes: slitting throats while no one was watching, slipping poison into tankards. And grinning. Always grinning.

Other characters, non sequiturs, occurred in the tableaux as well. The wind-up bird from the first level attracted friends, and the lilliputian robots could be spotted in the trees that flecked the murals’ backgrounds. By the fifth layer, branches were so full of these winged automatons that they bent and buckled. The rabbit recurred as well, always near the iron books that separated Library’s layers. The cat from the first layer abandoned its pursuit of the wind-up bird, having developed a fondness for the legs of whichever character was performing the most heinous murder. In the fourth level, a little girl with ponytails joined Chaucer, holding one of his hands while the other went about its deplorable work.

In the sixth layer, all the pilgrims were dead except for Chaucer and Harry Bailey. These two were painted on opposite walls, staring at each other across a floor littered with corpses. Harry’s face was burning with hatred, his fists clenched and his teeth bared. Chaucer’s teeth were also exposed, but in that same insufferable grin, and he was holding a hangman’s noose in one hand, the little girl’s tiny hand in the other. The cat was wrapped about his ankles. Swarms of wind-up birds populated the walls, arranged in orderly rows on logs and in tree branches, gazing with sightless eyes toward the center of the room, as if they expected some spectacle to unfold there.

The cathedral, which had been growing gradually closer in the preceding layers, was nowhere in sight. But there was something about the watchful wind-up birds that reminded me of churchgoers. Something about the files of corpses painted on the floor that reminded me of pews. Something about the way the hangman’s noose swung from Chaucer’s hand that reminded me of a priest’s thurible. Something about the iron book at the center of the room — Alice’s Tale — that reminded me of an altar.

This penultimate layer pulsated with suspense, with the promise of some terrible conclusion below. It was here that I told my own story, and I told it quickly, eager to clear the last layer and terminate our exploration of this nauseating place.

The final stairway was different than the others. Reggie explained it to us before we entered.

“There are actually two hatches, separated by a staircase. After passing through this hatch” — he pointed to the iron book — “you must close it behind you. The second, deeper hatch will not open unless the first hatch is closed. This means that for a brief time, you will be climbing in complete darkness. And the final layer, as you will see, is itself almost completely dark. What’s more, the staircase will hold only two of us at a time. In the interest of caution, I suggest that we travel in pairs. There are seven of us, so one of us will have to go it alone. I’ll volunteer to be the odd man out, seeing as how I’ve done this before.”

“No,” said Clara. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not going down there.”

Scia tried to comfort her sister, to convince her that it was more dangerous for her to remain alone on the sixth layer, twilit though it may have been, than to descend into darkness with six protectors. But Clara would not be swayed.

In the end we proceeded in pairs, as Reggie had suggested. He and Farmer went first, followed by Andrea and myself. Claude and Scia went last.

Library’s deepest layer was the size of a football stadium. When Andrea and I emerged on the other side of the second hatch, we found ourselves on a spiral ramp that led down to the floor of the enormous place. From our vantage point some seventy or eighty feet in the air, we could see that the whole space would have been pitch black — and it very nearly was — save for a single, massive image painted across the floor in shimmering white. This image must have spanned a hundred yards, perhaps more. It was a curve of white teeth, a disembodied grin.

There was nothing else here. Only the grin, and darkness.

When the six of us were assembled on the spiral ramp, we wound our way down to the surface. We stood on the teeth of the grin, staring into its faint glow, sipping silently at our last glass of brandy, soaking in the scale of the place, drunk with liquor and fear and wonder.

Eventually, Farmer cleared his throat.

His story was the most enthralling yet, fit for the climax of our descent. We had expected him to tell us about his sickle, about how he’d lost his hand and what had compelled him to replace it with so crude an instrument. But his story did not address the subject at all. And perhaps because it did not — because the omission suggested that there were more stories still, that we were just scratching the surface of this ancient man — we listened all the more attentively to the tale he did choose to tell.

When Farmer was through, Claude packed up our empty snifters and we plodded back toward the spiral ramp. We climbed up the dark staircase in pairs, the same way we’d come.

On the layer above, Clara was dead, hanging from her neck. The rope was fastened to the banister of the stairway that connected the fifth and sixth layers. Blood dripped from her shoes.

On impulse, I spun around to face Chaucer.

But he still held the hangman’s noose.