The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) by John Connolly Page B

and
they in turn affect all others. This is not just a library, Mr. Berger; it’s
the ur -library. It has to do with the rarity of the books in its
collection and their links to the characters. That’s why we’re so careful with
them. We have to be. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a
book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader. But
the books here are special. They’re the books from which all later copies came.
I tell you, Mr. Berger, not a day goes by in this place that doesn’t bring me
one surprise or another, and that’s the truth.”
    But Mr. Berger was no longer listening. He was thinking
again of Anna and the awfulness of those final moments as the train approached,
of her fear and her pain, and how she seemed doomed to repeat them because of
the power of the book to which she had given her name.
    But the contents of the books were not fixed. They were open
not just to differing interpretations but to actual change.
    Fates could be altered.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
    Mr. Berger did not act instantly. He had never considered himself a duplicitous
individual, and he tried to tell himself that his actions in gaining Mr.
Gedeon’s confidence were as much to do with his enjoyment of that gentleman’s
company and his fascination with the Caxton’s contents as with any desire he
might have harbored to save Anna Karenina from further fatal encounters with
locomotives.
    There was more than a grain of truth to this. Mr. Berger did
enjoy spending time with Mr. Gedeon, for the librarian was a vast repository of
information about the library and the history of his predecessors in the role.
Similarly, no bibliophile could fail to be entranced by the library’s
inventory, and each day among its stacks brought new treasures to light, some
of which had been acquired purely for their rarity value rather than because of
any particular character link: annotated manuscripts dating back to the birth
of the printed word, including poetical works by Donne, Marvell, and Spenser;
not one but two copies of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, one of them
belonging to Edward Knight himself—the book-holder of the King’s Men and the
presumed proofreader of the manuscript sources for the Folio—containing his
handwritten corrections to the errors that had crept into his particular
edition, for the Folio was still being proofread during the printing of the
book, and there were variances between individual copies; and what Mr. Berger
suspected might well be notes in Dickens’s own hand for the later, uncompleted
chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood .
    This latter artifact was discovered by Mr. Berger in an
uncataloged file that also contained an abandoned version of the final chapters
of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , in which Gatsby, not Daisy,
is behind the wheel when Myrtle is killed. Mr. Berger had glimpsed Gatsby
briefly on his way to visit Anna Karenina. By one of the miracles of the
library, Gatsby’s quarters appeared to consist of a pool house and a swimming
pool, although the pool was made marginally less welcoming by the presence in
it of a deflated, bloodstained mattress.
    The sight of Gatsby, who was pleasant but haunted, and the
discovery of an alternate ending to the book to which Gatsby, like Anna, had
given his name, caused Mr. Berger to wonder what might have happened had
Fitzgerald published the version held by the Caxton instead of the book that
eventually appeared, in which Daisy is driving the car on that fateful night.
Would it have altered Gatsby’s eventual fate? Probably not, he decided: there
would still have been a bloodstained mattress in the swimming pool, but
Gatsby’s end would have been rendered less tragic, and less noble.
    But the fact that he could even think in this way about
endings that might have been confirmed in him the belief that Anna’s fate might
be altered, and so it was that he began to spend more and more time in the
section