[b]Herbert
[/b]

It was all Herbert could have done to keep up with the bulk of the party. The events that then transpired left him with a thousand tendrils of thought that grasped at his waking mind with oppressive need for reconciliation. The hellish chimeras of snake and rabbit disturbed the murky memories hidden deep in the recesses of that abyss called the subconscious. Yet that was not the most striking thing to happen upon that snow-covered mountain; to bear witness to that so arcane and charnel act, well, it had left tremoring fractures upon his very psyche.

Even now, safe deep within the wild forest of books and shelves, he felt the thoughts still troubling him.  He could not keep his hands still. Each page he had to fumble apart from the next, fighting against the tremors. He had read books on medicine, first with the singular drive of furthering his medical understanding of death, and then morbid curiosity grasped him about his dear Liza’s condition, and if perhaps he could diagnosis it. Drifting eerily from aisle to aisle, he must have been the very image some ephemeral spectre of a lost soul, eternally searching for that which they would never find, dressed as he was in crumpled archaic clothes. Books upon books were scanned, but his mind was always pulled away and distracted, and twitching hands would ram books back onto shelves before continuing their futile search. 

It was useless. He knew it. If he wanted his Liza back, the simplest route seemed that unnatural pathway only partly elucidated by Twain. He decided to try and research it further, but with not much luck. 

In the end he must have stalked silently past the librarian half a dozen times, entering new areas of the dense wood of information. But he could find nothing save for fanciful nonsense or superstitious ramblings on the act of defying death. Whispering shades in his mind taunted him; he knew there were secrets underneath the fold of sordid amnesia brought about by his transmission into this future world. But lo, he could not recall them, no matter how much he strained. 

Herbert gazed out of the window and into the sea. On the surface of it, the array of unusually docile creatures was beautiful, but that façade was porcelain thin once you realised the magnitude of the open ocean. There was a crushing primordial fear of such vastness, a cancerous horror whose roots reach into the illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. 

Herbert’s foot began tapping, and as he turned back to his book, his frustration grew. He could not focus. His heart raced. The words seemed black smear upon the page. Still the devils jibed inside his head. It was too much. Overwhelming. 

With a roar, Herbert through the book he was holding hard and fast down the aisle. Then, silently, he fell to his knees. 

He sobbed.