by Kate Blair
“Can I go to the library?”
Mum raised an eyebrow, but flipped on the indicator and turned into the car park. “I guess you could pick up some books. I can get started on cleaning.” Mum tugged on the handbrake and rummaged in her purse. She held out a £20 note. “Grab some fish and chips for us on the way home. The kitchen’s in a right state. Ollie, are you going with Silva?”
Ollie glanced up. I was tempted to ask him to come. There was only a year between our ages, and when we were little, we’d sit on the train in the children’s section, reading books together. I missed the old Ollie, the boy behind the phone. But a voice in my head told me it was pointless. Even if he came, he’d only sulk. I hadn’t been like that, even at twelve. Of course, I hadn’t been allowed a phone until I was thirteen, and then Ollie was given one at the exact same time. He always had it easier than I did.
Ollie gave one shake of his head. No surprise there. I clambered out of the car and dashed through the drizzle.
Inside the library, the patter of the rain stilled, replaced by an echoing quiet, broken only by the occasional cough of an old woman browsing in the military history section. My soggy jeans clung to my legs like wet plaster.
The wooden ceiling rose to a point, supported by a star of white girders, strip lights dangling from them. I took a moment to breathe in the familiar floor-polish smell.
At the desk at the back sat a dark-skinned woman in a purple dress. “Hi there.” She wasn’t shouting, but her Portsmouth accent carried. “Is it lunchtime at the school?”
“I don’t go there. I’m visiting family. I have a library card.” I pulled it out of my jacket pocket and held it up, like a bus pass.
Her brow furrowed. “Didn’t I see you here in the summer?”
“Probably. I was here a lot. I’m Silva.”
“I’m Asha. You were reading The Dark is Rising, right? It’s one of my favorites.”
“Mine too.”
Her grin widened. “Oh! Then I have so many recommendations for you.”
“I just wanted to use the Wi-Fi. I need to look up stuff on … on Alzheimer’s.” Tears pricked at my eyes. I wiped at them, quickly.
“Oh. I see.” Her smile vanished. “It’s not for a school project, I’m guessing.”
I shook my head.
“I’m so sorry to hear it. Connect away. Why don’t you sit down at one of the tables and I’ll see if I can find some books, too.”
I sat down, signed into the library’s Wi-Fi, and searched. I found an article on celebrities raising money for Alzheimer’s charities, another about spotting the first symptoms, and a third on keeping your brain active. None of it was helpful. Asha’s footsteps echoed through the library. She came over with two books and a concerned expression.
“I’m afraid it’s heavy stuff. If you need any help understanding it, or just want to talk, let me know. All right?”
“Thanks.” I flipped open the first book.
HALF AN HOUR later I was numb.
I read fast, but the books were tough to follow in places. What I understood was bleak. At his age, Grandpa might have five or more years of life left, but he’d forget all of us. He’d lose his personality, his ability to walk, and slowly die.
On the page in front of me was a photo of a slice of post-mortem brain. Someone’s memories, their life, cut open and stuck to the page. I slammed the book closed and shoved it away. I got up and headed for the shelves.
I wandered up and down, pulling out a few of my favorites: A Wrinkle in Time, The Night Circus, and Harry Potter. The first Harry Potter, as everything was okay at the end of that one, and I needed a happy ending.
Because in real life, I wasn’t going to get one.
I hugged them against my chest as I drifted to my table. I tried to slip into the stories. They were usually my lifeline, my escape from moving between suburbs and small towns, between bland flats and rented houses. They were my camouflage. I could sit reading, and I was invisible. Being the invisible girl was better than being the new girl. When you’re the new girl you don’t know if people are being nice or sarcastic, until you’re surrounded by mocking laughter.
But I couldn’t concentrate. Grandpa was dying. He didn’t recognize me. Without him, what was there? I faded in and out of schools too fast to have anyone remember me. Mum was submerged in a job that moved us from town to town so fast I never knew my own postcode. Ollie didn’t think about anything other than himself.
If Grandpa didn’t remember me, it would be as if I didn’t exist at all.
That’s when I saw it: a flash of shining blue-black with a hint of white. It swooped down from the high windows to the floor, and landed between two shelves in front of me.
A magpie.
How had it got inside? Was there a window open in this weather? It hopped forwards, cocked its head sideways with that odd jerking motion birds have.
I glanced over at Asha to see if she’d noticed, but she was poking at her keyboard with one finger, nose crinkled, as if her computer had insulted her.
The bird bobbed onward. It twitched its neck around, dark eye on me. I had this odd feeling it wanted me to follow. It resumed its skittish hops. I stood and trailed behind it, feeling a bit silly. I followed it down a corridor of biographies, all the way to the pink-and-white spines of the romances. When I reached the back of the library, it vanished.
But there was an arched door: a wooden door, far too old for the modern building, with the silhouette of a magpie singed into it.
It was like something from the middle ages, squeezing itself into a space that should have been a blank wall. The wood was thick and pock-marked with age. My fingertips brushed against the ancient timber. It felt real. Felt as solid as the shelves, the books, the regular library. I laid my palm against it, felt the dry grain, the hard knots. It looked heavy.
And yet, when I pushed, it swung open easily.
Chapter Three
THE DOOR OPENED with a soft creak, revealing a round room, an impossible room. Warm air wafted out, with the comforting old-book smell of vanilla and stale coffee. Roots ran across the dark marble floor and branches climbed the stone walls, but instead of leaves, hundreds of colorful books balanced on the uneven limbs.
My hand went to my mouth. I stepped into the room and the door closed quietly behind me. Sunlight shone through a glass dome, filling the air with the glitter of dust motes, floating like miniature fireflies.
A mahogany chair stood in the center of the room. The magpie perched on it, the black of its wings contrasted against the red-brown wood. There was no one else in the room. Still, I turned around, just to check.
The only door was the one I’d come through. Could I get back? I darted over and opened it. There were the metal shelves of Hayling Library, gray and dull.
I let out a breath. I could leave now. Return, but to what? The books about Alzheimer’s? Grandpa’s mess of a house? His blank expression when he looked at me?
I let the door to the normal world swing shut again.
Six roots sprouted from the floor under the old chair in the middle of the magical library, cutting the circular room into sections like a wheel. They forked as they reached the walls and climbed up, splitting and branching, standing proud of the stone, countless books budding from their multiplying limbs like vibrant leaves: a busy smatter of color against the dark stone. The roots and branches made the library feel like a burrow, a forest, or a nest of shelves.
I used to dream of finding somewhere like this, but I’d given up long ago. I’d got no letter from Hogwarts. When we’d briefly lived in Oxford, I’d searched among the hornbeam trees of the northern ring road for Cittàgazze, and found nothing but the litter tossed from car windows.
But this was a real magical library. And it was mine. The first thing in forever that was really mine. This library was beautiful. Inexplicable
. Everything I’d dreamed of.
But it didn’t change anything. Grandpa was still dying.
The magpie watched as I approached the chair in the center of the room. A cushion softened the seat, embroidered with a tapestry of leaves. It was clearly the heart of the room, inviting me to sit and read.
“What is this place?” I asked the magpie.
It took off, flying so close that the breeze from its wings grazed my cheek. It fluttered up to a small, empty shelf near the top of the library, and perched there. I wandered over, alongside one of the six roots as it snaked across the dark ground.
“Am I meant to read a story?” It sounded stupid when I said it out loud. But the magpie tilted its head forward twice: a pecking motion, or a nod.
I spun on the spot, and the books blurred around me. “Which one?”
The magpie’s wings rustled in a quick bunching movement, like a shrug.
One of the roots reached the bottom of the wall in front of me. There was only one book on the lowest shelf. I bent down and picked it up. It was ancient, and bound in leather. The front was embossed with an image of a girl. She wore a big dress like one of Henry VIII’s wives and I knew enough from school and books set in the past, and Grandpa taking us to see the remains of the Mary Rose at the Historic Dockyards in Portsmouth years ago, that this had to be from about the sixteenth century. I eased it open. Thick italic letters covered the paper, handwritten. I tried to make out the words, but the letters were too pointy, too crowded.
“I can’t read this.”
Again, the magpie gave that odd shrug of its wings.
Fragments of old ink flaked off the thick paper. I closed it gently, afraid I’d damaged it. This book was probably nearly five hundred years old. It should be read with gloves, by an expert. I slid it back onto its shelf.
“Sorry,” I said.
The stories around it were almost as ancient, so I let my fingers trace along the shining shelves as they snaked their way up the wall. The books got newer as the branches forked and climbed. They faded from the dark brown of leather into deep red bindings, pastel hardbacks, then paperbacks with glossy spines. The uppermost shelves held books that would have looked at home in a modern bookstore, except the spines were blank: no titles, no author names.
I stood on tiptoe to grab the highest book I could reach. On the cover was a teen with slicked-back hair and a leather jacket. He leaned on a jukebox, peering down through the brightly lit glass at the stacked records. No title or author on the front. I flipped it over. There was nothing on the back, either.
Inside, the story started at the top of the first sheet. I flicked forward, looking for chapters breaks or illustrations, but there was nothing but text. Not far in, it cut off halfway down a page, leaving the rest of the sheets blank.
As I closed the book, a movement on the page caught my eye; a small scurrying, like an insect. But when I opened it again, everything was still. I shivered.
I slid it back on its shelf, and picked another. On this one was a younger boy, in a hall of mirrors, wearing a cap and short trousers. The reflections were distorted, but they weren’t his. They were other children and teens, in clothes from different ages.
“Books usually have descriptions on the back to tell you what they’re about. These don’t say anything. How am I meant to choose?”
Another little wing shrug.
“I’m … not good at decisions right now. I just got bad news about my Grandpa.”
The magpie nodded and hopped to a different branch. It turned its gaze onto a book. A rustle came from the shelf. The book sitting on it slid out, inch by inch, until it reached the edge. I held my hands out to catch it, afraid it would tip and fall. But the book opened and spread its pages as if they were wings. I froze, open-mouthed as it flew around the room, bobbing up and down as the cover flapped. It spun and wheeled, doing one more graceful circuit of the library before gliding down to where I stood.
It landed gently on my palms, cover-side up.
It was a hardback, with a pastel painting of a teen girl in a white nightgown. She knelt on the floor of a white room. I saw what she was clutching, and there was a suspended moment, weightless as the golden motes sparkling in the air around me.
It was an old-fashioned doll, just like the one on Grandpa’s arm, with black eyes and ringlets. I hugged the book to my chest.
“My grandpa has a tattoo just like that! Is this book something to do with him?”
The magpie bobbed its head in another nod.
I carried it to the big wooden chair and sat. I opened it at a random point near the end, to see what it was about.
Margaret heard crying, in the next room, breathless and weak, from the younger girl who had just arrived.
The ink seemed deeper than ordinary print. Blacker, with a hint of blue. I ran a hand over the raised letters, fingertips tracing the bumps and gaps.
Something twitched on my thumb. For a moment, I thought it was an insect, but it looked more like the letter “M.” It moved across my skin, bunching up and stretching like a caterpillar. I froze as it inched across my hand.
Other letters were moving, too, crawling off the page, and I realized, in the old book, the first book I’d picked up, it hadn’t been the ink “flaking” off the paper. The letters had been climbing from their places on the pages, just like here. Words scuttled onto my hands like spiders. I was too shocked to move.
She tried to block it out. Tried not to let the loneliness touch her.
I kept utterly still. Should I swat at them? What if they bit, or stung? The words I’d just read flowed over the backs of my hands, scampered up my arms. But they didn’t hurt. They barely tickled.
It wouldn’t be long until lights out. Then she’d be alone. Then she could escape.
Sentences crowded onto me like dark lace, until my hands and arms were covered. The letters left the pages blank. The sheets trembled and rippled, more like milk than paper.
The text tightened around my arms. There was a tug.
Before I could cry out, I was yanked forward, through the surface of the paper, and into the book itself.
I WOKE IN bed. For one wonderful moment, I thought the library and Grandpa’s sickness were a dream. But the walls were white, not the bland cream of the rented flats we lived in, and they were bare, punctuated only with a plain calendar, open to February 1946. Half the days were crossed off in thick black pen. A naked light bulb lit the room and a coarse gray blanket covered my legs. In one arm, I clutched a doll with ringlets, black eyes, and a red dress, just like the tattoo on Grandpa’s arm.
I felt dizzy. My lungs ached. The smell of bleach surrounded me.
I wished I could be back in my dear room at home, instead of this dreary one at the sanatorium. I was sick of this place, sick of this beastly disease.
Those weren’t my thoughts. They were someone else’s pushing in on my own, muddling them, making it hard to focus. My body felt strange: my whole being filled with a blood-deep sickness. And it was too skinny, too pale, to be mine.
Not long now. Almost time.
I tried to shake my head to clear the intrusive voice, but I couldn’t move. I tried to speak, but my lips remained shut. That’s when it hit me. This wasn’t just someone else’s room; this was someone else’s body. I was in someone else’s body, feeling through their skin, wearing their white nightgown.
The hours dragged here, seemed to stretch out for days.
I was the teen girl on the cover of the book: Margaret. I hadn’t just been dragged into her story, I’d become her. I was in the book, living it through her.
I felt it all: the prickle of the cold air on her skin, making the hairs on her arms stand on end; the catch of breath in her throat, too shallow. I wished she would inhale properly, deeply, or at least cough to clear her lungs.
Soon, I could take a brea
k. Escape this ghastly feeling, this awful sickness.
I should have been scared, but it was thrilling, being in a story. My excitement and Margaret’s merged. She clutched the blankets tight as our thoughts intertwined. Her anticipation consumed me, along with the bone-deep ache in her body.
In just a wink, I’d feel whole again. I’d escape from the dreadful loneliness of this hospital with its dashed insistence on rest, rest, endless rest, and more damned rest.
Margaret’s hands were porcelain pale. I wanted to look closer. Could I move her body? I concentrated, and tried to lift a hand. I willed myself into Margaret’s muscles, her arm, and her wrist. I thought of her body as my own and focused on taking control.
The crying from the next room cut off and Margaret’s hand rose.
It was oddly smooth, and heavy. But moving her hand felt wrong, like driving a corpse. Nausea rushed through me, along with a guilty feeling, as if I were breaking an important rule. I let go. The sobbing from the next room restarted, like a radio turning on, and Margaret’s hand fell back into place.
Okay, I wasn’t allowed to play puppet master. I was just along for the ride. This was Margaret’s book; I was an observer in the character’s body.
What could be taking Matron so long? It had to be lights out by now!
I was allowed to experience the story, not change it.
And wasn’t this exactly what I’d been seeking when I picked out my favorite books in Hayling Library? A chance to slip into a story so completely I forgot my worries.
I stopped fighting to keep hold of my memories. It was a relief to let Margaret’s feelings push mine out of the way, a relief to lose myself. I let myself be carried away by her story.
I became Margaret.
CRYING CAME FROM the next room, breathless and weak, from that young girl who arrived today, still calling for her Mama. I drew in a shaky breath. The sound of weeping was constant here. Patients grieving friends they’d lost, and our own lives, slipping away in the ghastly boredom. I clutched my doll tighter. Soon, I could leave the sanatorium. I could feel like myself again.
