The Left-Handed Booksellers of London

by Garth Nix

  “Door’s stuck again,” he said. “At half Gog, as we like to say. Welcome back, Merlin. Practically everyone from both shops is out looking for you.”

  “Audrey got here, then?”

  “She did, with her surprising and rather disturbing news,” replied the man. “No one can recall the urchins daring such a dance, at least to one of us. Oh, please forgive me. You must be Susan. My name is Eric. Can I offer you a towel, perhaps?”

  Susan looked down at herself. So much had happened so quickly she hadn’t had time to take in that she was soaking wet and her Docs were muddied to the ankle. Merlin was drenched, too, but he somehow looked glamorous, as if he’d gotten wet on purpose.

  “Uh, yes, please,” she said, correctly interpreting Eric’s quick sideways glance that he was really concerned she didn’t drip on any of the books.

  “Come straight along between the tables here and out to the staff washrooms,” said Eric. “And then they’re expecting you upstairs, Merlin.”

  “Both Greats?” asked Merlin. “Merrihew came in?”

  “Yes, they’re both here today,” said Eric. He hesitated, then added, “Good luck.”

  Merlin grimaced and handed him the blackthorn stick.

  “Give that to Audrey, will you, when she gets back?”

  Eric nodded, and popped it into a tree stump umbrella stand by the door, complete with sawn-off roots, which held several similar sticks, two ivory-handled black umbrellas of some antiquity, and a two-handed sword with a bronze entwined dragon hilt that was longer than he was tall.

  “Would you like me to take your glass rose, too?” asked Eric.

  “Uh, no, I’ll keep it,” said Susan. She wasn’t sure why, except that she wanted to look at it more closely when she got the chance. She’d seen it swaying and bending, the petals fluttering, and even though it was now stiff and solid glass, it had a naturalistic feel and looked like a work of very fine art, not something from some factory mold.

  Susan followed Merlin between the tables towards a door at the back of the showroom, trying not to turn her head too quickly to look at interesting books and shower them with droplets of water. Because the books were old and most didn’t have dust jackets, it was hard to see what they were while rapidly passing by, particularly without turning her head, but she did manage to read the gilt or silver embossed type on some as she went past, noting titles and names she knew like The Tempest and Ivanhoe and Persuasion and Wuthering Heights, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Austen and Brontë. Several shelves contained only Bibles, some of them obviously very old indeed, and there was a special display case between two bookcases where she paused for a moment, awed by its contents: William Blake’s Poetical Sketches, a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, and the crowning presence of a Shakespeare First Folio.

  Next to the rear door, there was a very large glass-fronted bookcase, where the books were not in rows, but face out on stands. Susan stopped as she recognized childhood favorites, made much easier because many of these were of a later era than those on the other shelves and did have dust jackets. There was John Masefield’s The Box of Delights; and the C. S. Lewis Narnia books; and Patricia Lynch’s The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey; The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker; Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken; several of Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novels, including Susan’s favorite, The Silver Branch; Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner; Five Children and It by E. Nesbit; and many others. Most were editions she knew from the library, but in much better shape, the dust jackets kept pristine under protective clear wrappers.

  “Children’s writers,” said Merlin. “Dangerous bunch. They cause us a lot of trouble.”

  “How?” asked Susan.

  “They don’t do it on purpose,” said Merlin. He opened the door. “But quite often they discover the key to raise some ancient myth, or release something that should have stayed imprisoned, and they share that knowledge via their writing. Stories aren’t always merely stories, you know. Come on.”

  Susan tore herself away from the children’s books and followed Merlin through a cramped rear office that contained two rolltop desks, an old wooden six-drawer filing cabinet, and a rifle rack containing six Lee-Enfield .303s, their 1907 Pattern Sword bayonets in a smaller rack below, and a slightly battered green ammunition case beneath that, with stenciled yellow type: “300 Cart. .303 Ball.”

  Merlin led Susan out through a door at the rear of the office, into a narrow wainscoted corridor with two doors on the left and a broad staircase on the right. The left-hand door had a stylized bonnet drawn on it in gold, and the right-hand a top hat.

  “Which bathroom do you want to use?” asked Merlin. “Towels inside, and there’ll be clothes, too; you can get changed if you want. Only boiler suits, I’m afraid, and mostly too big. I think we bought all Winston Churchill’s old ones. At least they’ll be dry.”

  “Are you getting changed?” asked Susan suspiciously. She couldn’t picture Merlin in an oversized Churchillian boiler suit.

  “Later,” said Merlin. “I’m only suggesting it because you really are very muddy. . . .”

  Susan looked down at herself, noted this was accurate, and went in through the door marked with the bonnet. She figured the women’s toilet would be more salubrious than the men’s. Cleaning toilets in pubs had made her well aware of the difference.

  When she emerged ten minutes later, Merlin was waiting. He had somehow cleaned and dried his blue dress, and the towel wrapped around his head in a turban didn’t look stupid, but like some sort of new fashion he’d started.

  Susan didn’t feel too jealous. Despite Merlin’s comment, she’d found a blue boiler suit exactly her size, and it still had a belt, which the ones she’d seen in charity shops had always long since lost. With the belt pulled in, the suit had some shape, and numerous useful pockets made up for the rough feel of the heavy cotton. She’d tied her own clothes into a bundle and felt rather like an unlikely hobo from a 1930s film, a bit too shiny and clean.

  “How did you get one that fits?” asked Merlin. “I’ve looked in both bathrooms tons of times! They’re always way too big! Were there any more that size?”

  “No,” said Susan.

  “Typical,” muttered Merlin.

  “What’s with all the boots in there?” asked Susan. As well as shelves of carefully folded blue boiler suits, there were racks and racks of highly polished heavy black boots in the expansive bathroom, which was more like a locker room at a big school than anything you’d expect out the back of a bookshop. Very large, cumbersome, and doubtless uncomfortable boots.

  “Old ceremonial stuff,” said Merlin, with a shudder. “Which we are forced to wear occasionally. Come on. Great-Uncle Thurston and Great-Aunt Merrihew are upstairs.”

  Susan took two steps up, and paused. The central staircase was older than the rest of the house. It was medieval, not Georgian, with black oak banisters and rough-planked treads. She looked up the stairwell and saw it extended at least six floors, which was one more than she’d counted from outside. Looking down, the stair disappeared into darkness after three or four flights; there were no electric lights down there, not even the dull, antique lamps on the staircase above.

  “Yes, there’s a kind of penthouse that can’t be seen from the street,” said Merlin breezily. “And the stairs go down a long way. The place was built around the remnants of an older one, and above an older structure still. Come on.”

  “I’ve had a lot to take in,” said Susan mulishly, sitting on the bottom step. “By rights I should be sobbing in a corner and demanding to wake up from this terrible dream.”

  “Really?” asked Merlin. He started back down the steps. “Uh, are you in fact okay?”

  Susan paused to think, then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “I wonder if it’s delayed shock. Later I’ll be talking gibberish.”

  She hesitated, then added, “In a way, it even felt . . . no
t unexpected.”

  “Being danced by goblins into a mythic May Fair?”

  “Yes . . .” replied Susan. She frowned. “Maybe I don’t know enough to be properly frightened.”

  “Maybe,” said Merlin. He seemed to be about to say something else, but didn’t, instead clattering on up the stairs. “Top floor! Come on!”

  Susan stood up, and followed, but she stopped dead on the first landing. The arched doors leading off to left and right here were eight feet tall and painted with scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. The left-hand door depicted the witches and Macbeth gathered around a huge iron cauldron, which looked oddly out of scale, being as tall as the women. The right-hand door featured Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest, with Caliban lurking in the darkness behind them, in a cave by the sea.

  Susan recognized the paintings immediately, or rather recognized they were much larger versions of paintings by an obscure eighteenth-century artist called Mary Hoare, who Susan only knew about because Hoare was one of the favorites of her art teacher, Mrs. Lawrence.

  “These are by Mary Hoare!” exclaimed Susan, leaning in close to look. “But much bigger . . . and in oils. Does anyone know you have these?”

  “I hope not,” said Merlin. “Mary Hoare was one of us, right-handed, you know. Lots of visual artists among the right-handed; we left-handed tend more towards poetry and music. I believe Miranda there is a self-portrait, of sorts. And the cauldron is . . . um . . . also based on . . . never mind.”

  Susan paid no attention to Merlin’s sudden reversal on whatever he was going to say about the cauldron. She leaned closer to look at the painted door.

  “If these are original,” she said, “they were painted in the . . . sometime around 1800?”

  “Seventeen ninety-six,” said Merlin. “We do need to get a bit of a move on—”

  “I love them!” exclaimed Susan. She started up the stairs. “Are there more?”

  “Uh, no,” replied Merlin. “I mean, no more by Mary Hoare. Slow down. . . .”

  Susan was taking the steps three at a time, but she slowed as she reached the next landing, and Merlin heard her disappointed sigh. The doors there were gray-painted steel, riveted along the edges, and would not have looked out of place on a ship. Which was actually where they had come from; they were armor-plated doors from the magazine of the World War One dreadnought HMS Benbow.

  “Those are from a battleship,” said Merlin, following Susan as she continued on up the stairs. “There have been a number of people in charge of interior decoration over the years, and since we practically never let visitors past the actual bookshop, there’s never been a push towards uniformity—”

  “You practically never let visitors in?” asked Susan. “What about me, then?”

  “You’re an exception,” said Merlin. “Evidently. Now, I wonder if you can tell me the artist responsible for the next set of doors?”

  Susan stopped again as they reached the landing of the third floor.

  “No . . . they’re beautiful. German, I think?”

  The doors here were very old, and each leaf was set with nine deeply carved limewood panels, depicting scenes of medieval life in a late Gothic style. There were peasants reaping a field, merchants weighing coins, knights at a tourney, monks in a scriptorium, a wagon at a tollgate . . . and several showing booksellers amongst their wares, but with swords hidden behind the books, and odd creatures, even a dragon. All beautifully represented, the carving incredibly detailed.

  “You’re good,” said Merlin. “They’re by Tilman Riemenschneider. A fifteenth-century sculptor. In Würzburg for the most part, though he carved these here.”

  “One of the right-handed?” asked Susan.

  “Oh no, not one of us at all,” said Merlin. “But he owed a debt to a family member, and made us these panels. I’m afraid the doors on the next two floors are perfectly ordinary, but we do have quite a quantity of artwork throughout the house, and elsewhere. I could show you around sometime, perhaps. Before we go out to dinner or whatever. People do tend to give us things when we help them out, and the right-handed are inveterate collectors of art.”

  “Points for inveterate,” said Susan as they continued upstairs. She chose to ignore the implication that they would definitely be going out somewhere together. “I’ve never ever heard anyone actually say that.”

  “We live among books,” said Merlin, with a shrug.

  “Do the left-handed collect anything?” asked Susan as they passed the doors on the next landing, which were very disappointing, and would not have been out of place at Susan’s 1950s-built school.

  “Weapons,” replied Merlin.

  There were three doors on the fifth-floor landing, where the main staircase ended. Those to the left and right were the same as the previous floor, dull factory-made things and only notable because they looked much newer than the rest of the building, things of ugly postwar painted plywood.

  But there was also one door straight ahead, which, while not adorned with artwork, had the impressive, dusky sheen of very old, highly polished mahogany. There was no doorknob or handle, but a knocker in the middle, a ring held in the mouth of a lion, whose bronze mane spread impressively for at least a foot in every direction.

  Merlin went up to the door and knocked three times.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, looking back over his shoulder. “You’ll be okay.”

  “What?” asked Susan, who hadn’t been worried about not being okay. Not until Merlin mentioned the possibility. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m on your side,” replied Merlin, stepping back as the door opened. There was no one there, only a narrow stair between roughly plastered stone walls. The steps were thickly carpeted in red with bronze stair rods, and lit by gas lamps, which Susan could actually hear hissing as they climbed up.

  “Why do I need someone on my side?” asked Susan. “And why the gas lamps?”

  “The Greats are old; they like familiar things,” said Merlin. “Affectation, I suppose. We are all a little prone to it.”

  Susan stared after him, wondering how long it was since any house in London, or anywhere in the United Kingdom, had been lit by gas. But as Merlin showed no sign of giving further explanation or slowing down, she followed.

  The stair went up a long way, and as they climbed, the plastering disappeared, and the stonework became more obvious.

  Finally, after what seemed to Susan to be an ascent equivalent to three or four floors, they came to another door, of rough-hewn wood. Merlin knocked again, with his gloved left hand, and it was opened immediately by a tall, elegant, very dark-skinned woman who looked to be around thirty or so, with long black hair in a gilded hairnet, wearing an ankle-length silk dress of vibrant red, and canvas jungle boots. She was backlit in the doorway by sunlight and made a very striking impression.

  She was holding a blue enameled fountain pen in her right hand and a notebook in her left. For a moment Susan thought she wore a single glove of brilliant silver cloth, before she saw it was her actual left hand that was shining silver and she wasn’t wearing a glove at all.

  “Cousin Sam!” exclaimed Merlin. “I didn’t know you were back. Writing a poem?”

  “Indeed,” said Sam. “Compulsorily returned for restorative reading and therapeutic poetical composition, post my contretemps with the Rollright stones and the Silver-Eyed One. Only to be dragged from my study to do a spot of light bodyguarding for the Greats, since there seems to be something of a flap going on.”

  “Sonnet? Villanelle? Chanso?” asked Merlin.

  “Limericks,” said Sam gravely. “Thematically linked limericks.”

  “I look forward to the next poetry night,” said Merlin. “Do you—”

  A slightly querulous, Scottish-accented woman’s voice from somewhere behind Sam interrupted him.

  “Sam! Is that Merlin and the girl? Hurry them along, I haven’t got all day!”

  Sam stood aside, and gestured. Susan followed Merlin, up into a
very large open-plan penthouse that had huge floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. She could see Hyde Park to the west, the houses on the southern side of Stanhope Gate and the Dorchester to the north, but they were all curiously below them, though she could have sworn the hotel at least should be much taller than the bookshop. It had stopped raining, and the sky was sort of blue, though it didn’t come close to the perfection of the May Fair sky the goblins had taken them to.

  Sam sat down on a chair by the door, lifting her book. There was a scabbarded sword leaning on the wall by her side, next to that an AK-47 and a canvas ammunition bag holding three curved magazines, and next to that a blackthorn stick very similar to the one Audrey had in the taxi. Susan tried not to look at Sam’s faintly glowing silver hand, and after two or three gawping seconds, succeeded.

  Looking across the room, Susan noted a life-sized bronze sculpture of a man that was either The Age of Bronze by Rodin or more likely a copy, since it looked rather battered and was being treated in a very cavalier fashion, with an old Burberry trench coat and some sort of waterproof cape hanging off its head. Apart from the sculpture and a broad and very faded Persian or Turkish carpet, the large room was very sparsely furnished. There was a 1920s art deco–ish lounge and three club style leather armchairs of older vintage facing it in the middle of the room, and between them, serving as a coffee table, a large cut-down whisky barrel with a glass top, the barrel staves marked in fading six-inch-tall red letters: “Milltown 1878.”

  Two seventyish or maybe older people put their books down and rose from their chairs to greet them. A silver-haired, craggy-faced man, massively shouldered, who had to be close to seven feet tall, clad in a well-worn tweed suit, a brown leather glove on his right hand; and a much shorter, slighter woman, still beautiful though very lined, her pure white hair pulled back and tied with a black ribbon. She wore a very eccentric outfit: a fisherman’s green vest replete with colorful flies hooked onto loops above the pockets, over a black, sleeveless cotton dress that showed off her surprisingly muscled, if wrinkled, arms, complete with a very faded tattoo of a long dagger with three drops of blood on her left forearm. She wore a rubberized gardening glove on her left hand.