At last Property gave up, and tipped herself out of her hammock. She tiptoed out to find a book to look at. It was too strange to try and sleep without the ritual page-turning.
Three doors were open on the shop floor: the Room of Dictionaries; the Room of Sticky Endings, which had got stuck and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard the Wollups tried; and the Room of Old Books. Property didn’t really want to think about that last room. She took a dictionary in honour of Michael, chose an armchair as far from Eliot and the Wollups as possible, turned on a lamp, and began to turn the thin, whispering pages.
It smelled strongly of Michael’s favourite shelf at the White Hart. She held it close to her face, and breathed in. As she so often did, she wondered what it was like to really read those mysterious markings.
A shadow twitched at the edge of the lamplight.
“Has anyone ever told you,” it said, “what a strange little girl you are?” And Eliot Pink came near enough to the lamp to be slightly more than a shadow. He stayed just outside the puddle of light.
Property told herself that it was only the half-light that made him look sinister. Still, she couldn’t help wondering whether the others, asleep in the Room of Desert Islands, would hear her if she yelled.
“You stare too much,” said Eliot. “And you blink less than other people.”
Property considered this. “You move less than other people,” she said. “Especially your face.”
To her amazement, Eliot laughed – a single ha. “True. You’re observant. Is your name really Property?”
Property nodded.
“Well then, Miss Property Jones. A word of advice. You can’t eat books.”
“I know that.”
“Well, you looked like you were trying.”
“I was just smelling it,” said Property defensively. There was a short silence, which seemed to suggest that maybe smelling books wasn’t entirely normal either.
“Funny way to read, wouldn’t you say?” said Eliot.
Property’s stomach back-flipped. Surely he couldn’t have guessed? She gabbled, panicked. “I just think it’s interesting, that’s all. They all smell different. Like, the old books, they smell of lignin. Although not the play, obviously – that just smells of sugar and lemon now, and something I couldn’t place. It was … a bit liquorice-y. And really new books smell fresh, but it depends how good the paper is, and…” Property had a feeling that she was making things worse. She thought she saw Eliot’s face twitch an especially violent twitch, but the shadows were shifting confusingly, and it was hard to be sure. “The words are good, too,” she added lamely.
He raised his eyebrows, then changed the subject without warning. “You don’t look like the other two,” he said. “You’re blonder and taller and your hair isn’t as curly. They’re not your real family, are they?”
“They are. They found me in a cupboard.”
“That’s a no, then,” said Eliot. “I’m surprised they put up with you. What use is an illiterate kid in a bookshop?”
Property considered this. “What’s illiterate?”
A muscle near Eliot’s mouth wriggled into an almost-smirk. “A word you ought to know. Means you can’t read.”
Property felt sick. So he did know.
“It almost seems,” he continued, “as if the others don’t know about it. But I’m sure that can’t be right. After all, you say they are family. It was obvious to me as soon as you picked up a book.”
“They are family.” Property’s eyes stung. “They just don’t always pay attention.”
“Probably a wise idea not to mention it now, though, if they don’t already know. I’m sure they’d be pretty hurt that you’ve lied to them all this time.”
Property wanted to scream at him to stop talking, but all she said was, “Why did you come over here?”
“Why did you?” Eliot took a pace forwards, and he was lit up for a moment. He paused, a long grey pause. Then he seemed to change his mind about something. He pointed to the Room of Desert Islands. “Time you were in bed, Property Jones.”
He spat out her name like a bad word. Property had no idea what she had done to make him so angry. Part of her wanted to refuse to leave, just to be stubborn, but a larger part of her wanted to get away from him as quickly as she could. The larger part won. She got up from the chair and crossed the shop floor, while Eliot Pink followed.
It felt as if he had cast some strange spell with his cruelty, and Property couldn’t think straight. The spell was broken by the Gunther, who dropped on them with great a war cry from above. He seemed to be aiming for Eliot’s shoulder, but missed, and ended up scrabbling madly for a hold on his coat.
There was a lot of paw-flailing from the cat, and a lot of muttering from Eliot. The Gunther managed to hang on by his claws to Eliot’s pocket. Eliot tugged him off, but ripped the pocket down the seam in the process, sending loose change and tissues and sweets rolling across the floor. The Gunther flew after them with an unhappy MAWR as Eliot flung him aside.
“I’ve changed my mind about the cat,” said Eliot. “You can keep it. Go to bed.” And he marched three paces away, back to where he had been standing before, and shut his eyes.
Property scooped up the Gunther and went back to her hammock. She climbed into it obediently. But inside, she wasn’t feeling obedient, and she wasn’t planning to sleep. Something had set her heart pounding, and the something was this:
The sweets in Eliot’s pocket had been liquorice.
She had swept one of the liquorice sticks up while she was picking up the Gunther. Eliot hadn’t seemed to notice. She clutched it in her hand now, and remembered the violent twitch of his face at the mention of the little sweet. What did it mean?
She wasn’t sure, but she had to try and find out.
She waited half an hour, to give Eliot time to fall asleep. Then another five minutes, to be sure. Then another one minute, for luck.
The Gunther climbed on to her face and looked into her left eye very sternly.
“I know,” whispered Property. “And I will go, but how do I know if he’s asleep?”
The Gunther leapt off her face and padded out into the entrance hall. As quietly as she could, Property dropped out of the hammock and crept across the sand to watch. In the dark everyone was a silhouette, but she could just about make out the shadow of the Gunther crossing over to the shadow of Eliot, and nosing him gently. Then a little less gently. Nothing.
The little cat jerked his head at Property, and she followed him out, and crossed the shop floor.
Even when they were among the lignin and dust with the door shut, Property didn’t dare turn on one of the tall lamps. Instead she used a small desk lamp that let out the softest of light. To be on the safe side, she stacked up some papers in front of it to dull the light even more. The marks from the frame mould glowed in the lamplight. She kneeled by the lamp with the play, and took a good look at the liquorice stick.
“What am I looking for, cat?” she whispered.
The Gunther looked as helpful as he could, turning his ears inside out and opening his eyes very wide, but that didn’t answer the question. Property’s heart slowed down a little. For a glorious moment, she had felt so sure that she was on to something important. But now she was here, she had no idea what she was looking for.
She unwrapped the liquorice – a black stick in a clear cellophane wrapper. It stank. She hated liquorice. She held it in her palm, and realized that she was sweating; the liquorice left a sticky mess.
“Ugh,” she whispered, “I don’t know why anyone eats this stuff, cat.” And she wiped her hand on her pyjama trousers. This turned out to be a really bad idea. Moist liquorice leaves a smear the colour of poo. It almost seemed to Property as if the Gunther was laughing at her.
“All right, I know what it looks like. But now is not the time,” she scolded him. She turned to the play.
Then she looked at her trousers.
Then she looked at the
play.
“Cat,” she breathed, “can you turn paper brown with liquorice?” Michael had shown her once how to make paper look old with wet teabags. They soaked pages in the pale brown liquid and left them out to dry. Did wet liquorice do the same?
She took the least-important looking paper from a stack of nearby old letters, sucked the end of the liquorice, and dragged it across the paper. It was a dark brown, too dark. Maybe she needed more water?
There wasn’t any water to hand: she would have to improvise. She scrambled over to the cupboard where she had found the play, and took out Montgomery’s lemonade. There was still about an inch of liquid left in there. She put the liquorice in it, counted to thirty seconds (although to be honest she raced through the last ten seconds very quickly), then poured a bit of the liquorice-liquid on her finger and dragged it over the page.
The paper turned a nasty yellow-brown.
“Is the play a fake?” she whispered to the Gunther. He squished his face up in delight. “Is that a yes? Oh – wait, I know how to check!” – and she shoved the papers in front of the lamp aside, and held one of the loose leaves of the play up to the light. There were no lines from the mould. The paper was ripped and torn, but perfectly smooth. She tried another. They were all the same.
The paper was machine-made.
“Modern paper! Michael said we didn’t use machines until the 1800s, cat. Shakespeare has been dead for … oh I don’t know, years and years and years. He can’t have written this.” Property was so happy that she did a foolish thing. She kissed the Gunther on the top of his head. The Gunther hissed and attacked her nose. It bled a bit, but Property didn’t care. She had to tell the others. It was a fake! They didn’t owe any money at all!
She flung open the door, and came nose to long, grey nose with Eliot Pink.
“You,” he said, “are a deceitful little girl.”
Property worked extra-hard at not blinking, just to annoy him. “You sold Montgomery a fake play and tried to cheat us out of forty-three million pounds. It doesn’t have any mould marks.” She held up the sticky piece of liquorice. “You dropped this, by the way.”
Eliot did not take the liquorice. There was a nasty silence.
“I see,” he said.
He thought a long, grey thought.
“I think,” he said, “on balance, that it would be better if you didn’t mention that to anyone else until tomorrow. We can have a little chat about it after your mother has signed my papers.”
And before Property could disagree, Eliot had shut the door. There was a sudden crunch, and the whole room lurched. Property only had time to think What on earth… before the room lurched again, and she fell back against a bookcase. She felt her head meet the wood. Then everything went dark.
IN THE STACKS
When Property woke she was still in the Room of Old Books, only now a headache was there with her. This was, she decided, a setback. She lay groaning on the floor for a minute, until it occurred to her how much more pleasant it would be to lie groaning in a hammock. So with a great effort, she got up to open the door to the shop floor.
The only problem was, the shop floor wasn’t there any more. Where the door should have been, there was just a stone wall.
Property took a few deep breaths. She wondered if this could be an illusion caused by the headache, decided that this was unlikely, and tried to think something more useful. Through the pulsing of the headache, a sensible thought reached her brain, and she realized what was going on.
Eliot had switched the rooms. He had put her in the stacks.
Then she remembered why he had put her in the stacks, and became dimly aware that she ought to be getting an urgent message to Netty. She waited for another sensible thought to arrive, but nothing came, so she just thought Help and Oh. The Gunther padded over and bit her ankles in an encouraging fashion. She stooped down to pet him.
“This isn’t good,” she said, “is it, cat?”
MAWR said the Gunther. He sounded a little less aggressive than usual.
“So what do we do?”
The Gunther put his head on one side and swished his tail thoughtfully, eyes shut. For a minute Property thought he had gone to sleep. Then he got up, spat at a passing piece of dust, and butted his head at a smaller door on the other side of the room. It was the emergency door that Montgomery had shown Netty. Property followed, and opened it.
She looked out, and her stomach turned itself inside out like one of the Gunther’s ears. She withdrew hastily.
“Bad plan,” she said. But then, the more she thought about it, the more she couldn’t think of any other plans. She peered back out again.
They were facing another dank stone wall, about a metre away from the door. Between the door and the wall, there was a sickening drop. The floor was out of sight. Above and below, stretching as far as Property could see, there were more rooms, suspended by a complicated system of ropes and chains. If she stuck her head out far enough to the left and right, she could see the next stacks on either side. The whole place was cold and silent, hanging like bones in a skeleton.
She withdrew again to give her stomach some time to right itself. What with her inside-out stomach and her pounding head, she was very tempted to curl up in that nice cupboard where she had found the play and have a nap.
But the longer she sat, the more she was remembering. The word illiterate wandered into her head, and eventually found words like use and bookshop that seemed to belong with it. Rearranged, they said:
Use a kid in what bookshop is an illiterate
which didn’t make sense, so she tried again, and made:
What use is an illiterate kid in a bookshop?
Then she regretted trying to remember anything.
“I’m not useless,” she told the Gunther. “I’m the only one who spotted that the play’s a fake.” But even as she said it, she realized that this wasn’t much use at all out here in the stacks. She had to tell the others before they signed Eliot’s papers, or else she was every bit as useless as he had said.
She spoke sternly to her stomach about the importance of staying the right way up, and opened the door once again. The darkness below felt so huge, she half-believed it could reach into the room and pull her out. She tried not to look.
The Gunther came to join her, and promptly fell over the edge.
“No!” gasped Property, leaning forward without thinking and almost toppling after.
There was a proud MAAWR from just below. The Gunther was hanging from the thickest of the ropes, perfectly content. He climbed up and down the rope a little, as if to show how easy it was.
“That,” said Property, “is mad.”
But then, the situation was urgent. The Joneses were about to lose everything they had. And now she was remembering an icy voice saying, They’d be pretty hurt that you’ve lied to them all this time, and she was determined to do something so good that no one could ever doubt her loyalty to her family, even for a second. Climbing the ropes might be mad, but it was possible, and that was a start.
She’d need to find a room that was currently on the shop floor. Michael had definitely opened the Room of Dictionaries, one door to the right of the Room of Old Books. If she could cross over to that stack, maybe she could find it.
But how could she get across?
An uncomfortably long way below, there was a metal bar running between the stacks. She could probably get over that way, if she climbed down to it on the rope. Even then, it would be a long job to find the right door.
MAWR, said the Gunther, impatiently.
“All right, all right. Little beast,” said Property. And she leaned out to the side and gripped the rope firmly. Then, with a deep breath, she swung out of the Room of Old Books, and put her whole weight on the rope.
All the rooms on the stack rattled at this unexpected disturbance. Property’s stomach quit the whole situation, and went to live a quiet life at the top of her throat.
The stacks w
ere cold and cavernous. Property instantly regretted her decision, but before she could change her mind, she lost her grip and slithered down several feet of rope. She let out a scream, and it echoed around the stacks long after she had finished. It sounded as though the Emporium itself was screaming.
For a minute after that she stayed very still, clutching at the rope with her eyes tightly shut.
This was a terrible idea; she had to get back inside. When she could bear to open her eyes again, she began to inch down towards the closest room, one careful hand at a time.
Moving down the rope, she began to feel a little less scared. It wasn’t so difficult, once she got into the rhythm of climbing – as long as she didn’t think about the drop. She began to climb a little faster, and when she reached the next door, she hesitated. Now that she had come this far, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea to keep going?
The Gunther MAWRed from somewhere below her feet. Property made up her mind. “Coming!” she called, which echoed in a determined sort of way – Coming! Coming! Coming! And she ignored the welcoming door, and carried on down the rope.
The climb down made her arms ache and tremble. When she reached the strip of metal, it was not as wide as she had hoped, and the floor was still so far away that it was out of sight. The Gunther struck out merrily enough, but that is all very well if you are a cat and have nine lives. As far as Property was aware, she only had one life. And until strangers had started turning it all upside down, it had been a life that she was fond of.
She put one foot on the bar. She would have preferred to crawl across it instead of walking, but it wasn’t quite wide enough. Getting off the rope was the worst of it: once she was there, she could put out both arms for balance. The metal was cold against her bare feet.
She walked across very, very carefully. The stacks seemed to hold their breath.
Climbing back off again at the other side, the coarse feel of rope between her palms and soles felt like heaven.
“Up or down?” she asked the cat, who hung below her. He shrugged, wobbling.
The Bookshop Girl Page 4
