Duluth’s Little Libraries
Missing: Our Little Billy
Duluth’s little library boxes hold dangerous books. Our little Billy, age 10, noticed this the first time he peeked into the lil library, painted with starscapes, in the middle of our Central Hillside block. He opened the lil door to get a closer look at the books, which he assumed would be about stargazing and astronomy. Instead he found cosmic horror in the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft, including illustrated editions and graphic novels, with supplemental books of criticism and analysis, even a film section. The little library contained a whole cosmos.
After he consumed his fill he noticed the lil library on the next block. It was a plain pine box stocked with vintage pornographic woodcuts, volumes of them including Hokusai prints worth a fortune depicting copulation with sea creatures. We complained and the library box was removed leaving an empty post.
But the lil library scene in the walkable neighborhood was “lit” as our little Billy put it. He found one constructed with movable panels and shelves that changed the library design according to whim. It held the inscrutable works of the revolutionary Guy Debord and his apologists, with the subversive roman-à-clef novellas of Michèle Bernstein, and rare books by the architect Constant, lavishly illustrated with plans for post-capitalist sky-cities of perfect freedom. Even some books devoted to armed rebellion: The Anarchist Cookbook and its descendants, including the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang which is actually a manifesto with practical recipes for good trouble. They were way above our little Billy’s reading level but he stepped up, processing the bizarre information. By the end of the summer, our little Billy was reading at a college level.
The next block over had a lil library box that looked like a dollhouse. An accessory — a dog treat box that looked like a miniature doghouse — was affixed at dog’s-eye level. The books were devoted to Satanism, voodoo, the African iron god Ogun, Santeria, Neopagan witchcraft, and included an edition of Lovecraft’s The Necronomicon misfiled by a fellow local child who was thinking of the Lovecraft library a few blocks over. Our little Billy was unsure if The Necronomicon was a hoax or not. You can read at any level and still confuse reality with fiction.
Our little Billy sensed the outlines of a neighborhood conspiracy devoted to far out texts. How much could his mind take? Downhill a block he found a library box painted with primary colors, an accessible Mondrian-like design indicating child-friendly books. But instead Billy found documentation of contrary scientific explanations for everything, a world of reverse theories and alternate data. Seated in a patch of sun on green grass, he read that gravity pushes from above instead of pulling from below. He read that the double-slit experiment hints that scale is infinite like space and time. Subduction of tectonic plates reads in reverse as planetary expansion, breaking apart Pangea in perpetuity as Earth grows into a hot Jupiter with continents of molten iron, then into a star. He tried explaining it to us, but we just didn’t get it.
Cutting back closer to Chester Creek, our little Billy found a lil library box in somewhat poor repair, full of water-damaged volumes of sigil magic, chaos magic, sex magic, and tantric beliefs. He was too young but he understood it on the level of energy. We complained but the homeowner refused to take it down. So we made our little Billy swear to never visit that lil library again. Instead he turned to a matte-black-painted library of true crime and conspiratorial thinking.
Billy’s next library discovery, on the edge of Portland Square Park, focused on old-school vintage horror and monster comics, the good stuff by Wally Wood, Bernie Wrightson, Marie Severin, Simon & Kirby — pre-comics code pages including weird alien space stories by Basil Wolverton, and Hank Fletcher the comics auteur cursed by his own children. But Billy didn’t know about all that; he felt his head in the stars where it belonged.
The last little library Billy discovered was outside a house close to Chester Creek, and it held many copies of one book, in differently formatted editions: The Secret History of Duluth, Minnesota, composed of essays from local blog Perfect Duluth Day. He wasn’t sure what to believe. It seemed to our little Billy that he was being subliminally directed to explore the storm drain close to our house, part of the Brewery Creek system now almost entirely underground as the hillside grew up around it. Brewery Creek is haunted by spelunkers and tunnel rats, and our little Billy was haunted by what he found, which was what he was afraid of. The Lovecraft texts warned him there might be tentacled horrors. Everything he’d read since then convinced him: be afraid of your own shadow, and pursue that fear to the edge of madness.
One day our little Billy was not seen again. It is generally assumed, after some ineffectual investigations, that he went and drowned in the creek tunnels, his body lost out to sea through a maladjusted grate.
But one thing the investigators found was a degraded drain opening into the Brewery Creek tunnel. A slick discharge pipe, it led back to the basement of a local home. And that basement contained an unfinished corner, with an entrance to the wild Duluth cave system leading to Lake Inferior, the hidden lake under Lake Superior. In other words, whatever lived under the lake had a pathway up to this basement, and from there to the creek tunnels and the neighborhood. The basement was a zone of transit. Any housing inspector worth their salt would have had the unfinished corner cemented over as a radon hazard if nothing else. And the drain should have been fixed. Children should not be able to crawl from Brewery Creek into discharge pipes and the basements of abandoned houses, from there to the underworld. Well it’s all fixed now, the city ordered the work even though the homeowner is perpetually out of town.
We know our little Billy was there because they found not him but a book from a local lil library: that mis-filed paperback copy of The Necronomicon. It was inside the cave entrance to god knows where, abandoned from his back pocket to make it easier to squeeze down into the constricted spaces. It was not enough to build a case on. Our hope is that our little Billy dwells in wonder and glory forever.
The real mystery is who owns that house. Neighbors report long absences, and even when the occupant is home he demonstrates extreme reclusivity and the persistent use of N95 filter masks. His size and shape are the topic of disagreement. But everyone agrees he hasn’t been seen face-to-face in 30 years. The accusation that this homeowner is a slippery fish-frog man remains unsubstantiated. The house has a lil library box on a post like so many others. It is painted dark blue, decorated with nautical elements. The books it contains are about death at sea.
An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.