Finding Serendipity

by Angelica Banks

  She ducked behind a chair and peeped over it. She listened and looked, intently. Only when she was entirely certain she was alone in the room did she stand up.

  The room looked different at night. For one thing, at the centre of each table was a beautiful egg-like lantern that gave out a soft, green light. On the buffet table were only two silver domes. Tuesday tiptoed softly across the room and by the greenish light read the words on the cards. The first said: I’m On A Roll And Couldn’t Possibly Sleep. Under the dome was a tiny white cup full of a dark liquid that was certainly coffee. Tuesday wrinkled her nose, replaced the dome and moved on to the next one. The card read: Absolutely Nothing Is Going According To Plan, and under the dome she found exactly what she was looking for: a pot of chocolate custard topped with slices of fresh strawberries and a swirl of cream.

  Without thinking, she took two of the little pots, one for herself and one for …

  ‘Oh, Baxterr,’ she whispered, and as she put the second of the pots back under the silver dome, she felt tears gather. With all her heart, she wished that her dog were here, beside her, and not at the mercy of a vengeful pirate just back from the dead. She had to hurry. Tuesday had no idea what her wasted day adrift had cost Baxterr and Vivienne, but she felt that she must still bring help. If everything was not lost already, she reasoned, she had no time to lose.

  Tuesday spooned the custard, cream and strawberries into her mouth. Even at high speed, the custard was seriously delicious and the taste of it was enough to make her feel a little less despondent. Somewhere in the Library, she would have to find the help that she needed, and quickly.

  Placing the empty bowl back on the buffet, Tuesday crept towards the doors that led to the foyer. Though it was very late, she thought there might be somebody awake in the heart of the Library, in the great book-room itself. Her true hope, the one that she hardly dared admit to herself, was that the person she would find was the one person who could help her out of this terrible mess – her mother, Serendipity Smith, working at her favourite desk by the window.

  Tuesday opened the door and edged out into the foyer, keeping close to the walls, darting from pillar to pillar, once more shrouding herself in shadow. She made her way carefully, quietly, towards the doors on the far side and was almost there when she tripped on something rather large that had been left lying on the floor behind a pillar. Her head caught a sharp corner of stone as she went sprawling, her elbow hit the marble floor while her knee ploughed into something relatively soft.

  ‘Oooooofffff,’ came a voice.

  As Tuesday collected herself she realised that the thing she had tripped over wasn’t a thing but a person, and the soft object her knee had rammed into was that person’s stomach. Further, the person she had tripped over, who was holding his middle and groaning, was Blake Luckhurst. The Blake Luckhurst.

  ‘Blake!’ Tuesday said in an excited whisper, trying to prevent herself from hugging him out of sheer relief.

  She looked at him more closely, and her relief turned to concern. Even in the dim light she could see he had been badly hurt. There was clotted blood at his temple, one of his eyes was blackened and his jaw was swollen. He was covered in grime and dust, and smelled of dirty sports socks. Beside the patch of floor upon which he had been sleeping were seven or eight white pots, empty except for some remnants of chocolate custard.

  ‘I’m guessing that absolutely nothing is going according to plan,’ Tuesday said softly. ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

  ‘Unexpected mission failure,’ Blake murmured. ‘I think I’ve cracked some ribs.’

  ‘What were you doing out there?’

  ‘Oh, y’know, just trying to keep things interesting. A little nitric acid, a little sulphuric acid … add some glycerine … boom! I got carried away.’

  Blake sat up and coughed, wincing as he did so. The blood at his temple was from a weeping wound on his head.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Find that mother of yours?’

  ‘No,’ Tuesday said. ‘You see, Mothwood has my dog – you remember – Baxterr? And he’s going to kill Vivienne Small. I have to help them, but I can’t do it alone. I went looking for help, but I lost a whole day just floating about in mist and then, well then I climbed up here. But now that I’ve found you, maybe you can help me. Although you don’t look like you could be much help. But please, Blake, please will you help me? If you’d only seen Baxterr standing there, all tied up and snarling …’ ‘Whoa, whoa, Yesterday. That’s not … that’s Serendipity Smith’s story: Mothwood? Vivienne Small? I thought you were writing some missing-mother thing.’

  ‘Well, I …’ Tuesday said, her brain whirring. She was perilously close to letting slip her family secret. ‘The thing is,’ she hurried on, ‘I’m not making this up. I really have lost my mother, and I thought that if anyone could help me find her, it would be, you know, Vivienne Small.’

  ‘But you actually got into a Serendipity Smith story?’ said Blake incredulously. ‘Man, that is crazy!’

  ‘That’s why I can’t ask the Librarian for help,’ said Tuesday. ‘If she finds me here, she’ll send me home. So you see, you’re the only person who can help me – please say you will,’ Tuesday begged, but Blake was completely distracted.

  ‘I didn’t even know it could be done,’ he said. ‘What happened when you got in?’

  And so Tuesday told him how she’d fled down the stairs and walked to the Peppermint Forest and discovered Vivienne’s tree house broken to rubble. She explained how she’d found Vivacious and learned to sail, and how Baxterr had nearly drowned and Vivienne Small had saved him. She told him about the raid on The Silverfish and how Mothwood had come back to life, and about the long and terrible sail through the endless fog.

  ‘Hey,’ said Blake, sitting up a little straighter when she finally fell silent. ‘Not a bad effort, actually. I mean it’s your first time so, you know, you can’t expect perfection. I thought you were writing some soppy mother-daughter business. You know, haircuts and clothes and whatever girls are into. But your story – it’s got violence, it’s got drama, it’s got tension. All you need to do is keep going. Get to The End.’

  ‘But that’s just it! Blake, I can’t find The End anywhere. It’s not on Mothwood’s maps and Vivienne Small hasn’t even heard of it.’

  Tuesday was certain Blake was about to scoff at her, or tell her how stupid she was, or how great he was, or both. But he didn’t. Instead, with a weariness that might have been caused by his hurt ribs and damaged face, or simply because he understood and even sympathised with her, he said quite gently, ‘Yeah, The End, hey? The thing about The End is that it’s not on any map. It’s not a place, right? Well, it kind of is. I suppose you could say it’s a place you have to reach, but it wouldn’t have any actual coordinates. You couldn’t program it into your GPS. The End is … The End. It’s where you get to when your story’s done. There’s no rushing it. It’s more a feeling than anything else. That’s what makes it so difficult.’

  Tuesday sighed with exasperation and said, ‘Why won’t anyone listen to me when I say that I am not, repeat not, writing a story?’

  Blake made a grimace of pain as he got slowly to his feet.

  ‘You think?’ He grinned. ‘Well, let me show you something. Come on. The Librarian won’t be about at this hour.’

  Blake limped to a set of double doors at the side of the Library and pushed one open. It led to a smaller foyer with lamps fixed to the walls at regular intervals. Ahead was a single door.

  ‘She’ll never show you this room,’ Blake said. ‘She likes us to think it doesn’t exist. But it does.’

  A sign affixed to the door read: No Admittance. Staff Only.

  ‘I figure as I’m keeping her in a job, I must be staff as well.’ Blake smiled and held the door open for Tuesday to enter, before sidling in behind her. The door closed with a quiet shush. Inside the room was a smaller version of the great Library. Here the hanging lights were blue and there wer
e rows of bookshelves filling the room. But this room felt entirely different. It was colder. There were no desks and no writers. Tuesday gazed at the shelves. There was something about the books. They looked as if they were made of glass. And when she looked closer some of them shimmered while others were entirely transparent. Some looked as if they were made of delicate wax and others from clear cellophane. Still others appeared to wobble as she passed. Inside them she could see slender pages. When she tried to read the spines of these strange books, the letters scrambled and disappeared, reappearing in different forms as if they were holograms.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Tuesday asked in a hushed voice.

  ‘They’re kind of … vulnerable.’

  She reached out to take one from the shelf and her hand passed right through it.

  ‘You can only touch your own story,’ said Blake.

  ‘What is this place?’ Tuesday whispered.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Blake, wheeling a ladder towards her. ‘Let’s find M.’

  Together they walked between two long high shelves going deeper into the room. At last Blake found what he was looking for, although Tuesday was still confused. Looking at the books was as strange as opening your eyes underwater, or looking at trees through a rainy window.

  ‘Here you go,’ Blake said, shifting sideways on the ladder so Tuesday could climb up beside him. ‘Check this out.’

  Blake pointed to one particular book on the shelf right in front of them. Its cover might have once been deep red, but the clear glass cover had faded to a faint pink. There were words on the spine where the name of the author ought to be, but they were so vague that Tuesday could barely read them.

  ‘You have to look closely,’ Blake said, climbing down a rung or two to give her more space.

  Tuesday narrowed her gaze until she could just make out the ghostly silver letters on the book’s transparent spine. Tuesday McGillycuddy. Tuesday McGillycuddy?

  ‘That’s my name,’ Tuesday said. ‘But it can’t be me. It has to be some other Tuesday McGillycuddy.’

  Blake snorted.

  ‘If it was mine why would it be so old and faded?’ asked Tuesday. ‘Anyway, it’s not a book.’

  ‘That’s right. It’s not a book. Yet. And it’s not faded,’ Blake said. ‘It’s so new it hasn’t got its colour yet. Nor its title. But open it up.’

  ‘Can I?’ Tuesday asked cautiously.

  ‘Believe me, it’s yours,’ said Blake.

  Tuesday reached out and very carefully touched the book. This time her fingers didn’t slip through nothingness. They touched a cover that felt as fine and smooth as glass. She slid it from the shelf. It weighed almost nothing. Inside the pale transparent cover were delicate pages, tissue-thin and entirely blank.

  ‘Look’ she said, indicating the empty pages. ‘There’s no writing.’

  Blake shrugged. ‘It’s just a beginning. It’s taking form. That’s what all these books are. Many of them never get finished. It makes the Librarian so mad when that happens. She hates this place. She’d prefer it didn’t exist. But it has to exist. It’s like the incubation room. All these ideas are trying to be books. But most of them won’t make it. Hardly any in fact.’

  ‘Look around you, Tuesday,’ Blake said, in a perfect imitation of the Librarian that made Tuesday giggle. ‘Look at my shelves! Everywhere I look, books begun and never finished!’

  Blake went on in the Librarian’s gravelly voice, ‘Perfectly good books if only their writers would stay here long enough to get them done. I don’t know what it is with writers these days. So many of them lack stickability.Yes, that’s what I like in a writer, stickability. That young Blake Luckhurst, he’s frightfully slapdash when it comes to punctuation, but he’s got stickability – I’ll say that for him.’

  ‘So now,’ Blake said to her as he clambered down to the ground, ‘do you want to tell me you’re not a writer? Managed to get here with a ball of thread. Got all the way into your story before you had your own version of what I like to call The Swamp of Doubt – when you don’t know where you’re going or what will happen next so you stumble about in a fog. And then you made your way back here. And lo and behold, there’s a book with your name, no doubt the one and only Tuesday McGillycuddy in the whole world.’

  I am a writer. Tuesday tried out the sentence in her head. I am a writer. It felt good. She looked again at the book in her hands. My book, Tuesday thought. And there was something on the cover, but it was shifting and changing. As she angled the book, she saw the word Finding, but when she moved it, the word changed to Losing.

  Finding? Losing? Tuesday’s heart raced. What did it mean? Was it Baxterr? Vivienne? Her mother? As she climbed back down the ladder, she saw Blake casually juggling his ball of silver thread. It curved in the air from one hand to the other. From the second last step of the ladder, Tuesday swiftly reached out and intercepted it mid-flight.

  ‘Hey, give that back!’ Blake snapped.

  ‘Settle, petal,’ Tuesday said, quickly returning it. She liked this helpful Blake and didn’t want the arrogant, annoying Blake to return and spoil everything.

  ‘You don’t let anyone take your thread,’ Blake said, holding it up to Tuesday. ‘Not even for a minute.’

  ‘But the Librarian took mine.’

  ‘Yeah, I was dumb enough to let her take mine on my first book, too,’ Blake said.

  ‘But why does she do it?’ Tuesday asked. ‘If it’s so important why does she take it off us?’

  ‘So you don’t go home before you’re finished,’ Blake said. ‘That way, the half-baked ideas in this room get to become real books and move next door, into the real Library. The Librarian’s cool, but man is she obsessed with books.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Tuesday said.

  ‘The thread is how you get home, right?’ Blake said.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Tuesday, feeling the light bulb blink on in her head.

  ‘I mean, she’s got a point,’ Blake said. ‘When you get home, it’s easy to forget that this world even exists.You get on with all the other stuff and life goes by. Before you know it, you just lose the plot and your book never gets finished.’

  ‘But how does it take me home?’ Tuesday asked, gazing at Blake’s thread and wishing desperately she hadn’t let hers be taken by the Librarian.

  ‘Easy. Just hold onto the end and throw it up in the air. It’s pretty quick,’ said Blake.

  ‘So, if you wanted to, you could go home right now?’ Tuesday asked him.

  ‘Yep, right now,’ he said, tossing the ball just a little way up, then catching it again. ‘Just step outside and fffftt … you’re gone.’

  ‘And you could come back another day, and finish your story?’

  ‘Sure. That’s what we do. But I’ve got a deadline, y’know. And school and stuff. I haven’t got time to muck around going backwards and forwards. Nice as it would be. I just don’t have this book sorted enough. It’s a bit of a mess … as you can see.’

  Blake’s face looked very bruised in the pale blue light. The blood had congealed in his hair, but the cut above his eye was still weeping slowly.

  ‘And my ribs are killing me,’ he added.

  ‘Give up?’ Tuesday said with a grin. ‘Not the Blake Luckhurst.’

  For half a second, she saw a rueful smile on Blake’s face, but then his expression changed. From the far side of the room came the sound of a door closing, followed by distinct footsteps. The lights flared to full strength, making the books on the shelves sparkle and shimmer, and Tuesday and Blake squint. The diminutive form of the Librarian appeared wearing a purple dressing gown and mauve high-heeled slippers with sparkly pom-poms on their toes. Her silver hair was encased in a fine net and her spectacular pearl earrings were conspicuously absent.

  ‘Mr Luckhurst!’ she announced in a low, irritated voice. ‘Are you bleeding? Go to my private study, immediately! Heavens, what have you been blowing up this time?’

  ‘Only a train
, and an embassy. Oh, and a helicopter. Or two,’ Blake said, guiltily. ‘Sorry, Madame Librarian.’

  ‘Off you go, right away. I’ll be there momentarily to see to those cuts and bruises.’

  Tuesday and Blake exchanged a quick glance before Blake sidled off. Tuesday took a deep breath, fearing that she was in for a far worse fate than the application of a bandaid or two.

  ‘And Miss McGillycuddy,’ the Librarian said, her voice as cold as an icicle. ‘You’ve returned, I see.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Please don’t send me home,’ Tuesday begged. ‘I know that I didn’t do exactly as you said, but please, it’s my dog. And Vivienne Small. They’re out there in trouble and I have to help them.’

  ‘Get control of yourself, child,’ the Librarian said, her voice warming just a little. ‘So, have you made progress? Tell me.’

  And so, for the second time that night, Tuesday told her story.

  ‘Good, good,’ said the Librarian. ‘I knew I was right about you. I think that this will be only the first of many stories from your pen, hmmm?’

  ‘Well, that’s all very well,’ Tuesday said, ‘but I can’t find my mother, which is why I came here in the first place. I can’t find her and I can’t find The End so I have no idea what to do next.’

  ‘Well, let me ask you this, Tuesday,’ said the Librarian, staring into Tuesday’s blue-green eyes. ‘Where did you leave your mother?’

  ‘Leave her? I didn’t leave her anywhere. I told you … remember? That she went missing, and I came here to find her.’

  ‘Then where did you last see her?’ continued the Librarian.

  ‘At home, of course,’ said Tuesday. It seemed like a lifetime ago that Tuesday had set out for her last day at school before the holidays. As usual, she had crossed the road outside their house and, looking all the way up to the top storey, she had seen her mother in the window waving goodbye.

  ‘Then it is plausible, is it not, that that is precisely where she is to be found?’ the Librarian asked gently.