The Lake and the Library (4 page)

And suddenly I was there, and even through sheets of rain and wind-whipped branches, the building stood defiantly, sinking deeper into the ground and refusing to be uprooted despite the onslaught the sky intended. I caught my breath and lunged for the porch, using the cover to get myself together for the task at hand. I tried, feebly, to ring out my hair, smoothing it back so I could go through my bag of supplies unhindered. I noisily wiped my nose. The crowbar was about the only thing I brought that could make a difference. I weighed it in my hand and gripped it tightly, shouldering my bag. Weapon in hand . . . but where to start? I got up and walked to the Fable Door. Despite my dreams that brought the place to life, in reality the chains and boards kept it shut up tight, and even when I slipped the hook of the crowbar into a loose seam, the barriers wouldn't give. I shouldn't have expected to just walk in the front door, anyway. But the back . . .

The rain pelted down with sudden violence, and the sky shifted from milky to bruise purple. The dark and the wet worked seamlessly to make the discarded garbage and old car husks in the building's backyard look monstrous, like they were reeling back to spring on me at any second. The nearby trees of Wilson's Woods weren't faring as well as the building. They swayed and buckled, bending at impossible angles against the wind. Prairie storms came and went, but I couldn't remember a tempest like this one in Treade. It was like I'd stumbled into an arena where a battle of colossal gods was underway, and I was holding only a crowbar. I was having a hard time even moving against the breath-stealing gusts, and I wondered if the wind could make my own body bend the wrong way, like the trees.

I stuck close to the building's back wall, clinging to the siding until I came up to one of the large bay windows, the boards covering the glass hiding underneath. I hadn't been the first to try this, it seemed. The bottom seam of the boards looked chewed up in the places where other improvised tools had attempted to dislodge them. Someone had even tried battering their way in underneath the window, digging out the wall. I reeled back, tightening my hands and muscles, and gave the worn-in impression a
smack
that reverberated in my veins. Shards and splinters flew back at my face with every hit I tried, but I wasn't going to get in any day soon. I'd have to be at this for weeks before seeing results — which I'm sure the previous attacker concluded before giving this all up and going home, pretending it never happened. As I moved up and tried to work the boards away, my adrenaline started to wear out. What chance did I, with the upper-body strength of a raccoon, have against the elements? Against time? Against this building which seemed to flinch every time I came at it with my crowbar? I eventually lost my patience, beating the remnants of that wall like it had besmirched my name, feeling helpless and alone and soaked, like the world itself was closing around me in a rain-soaked fist.

The thunder hurled so hard above me that I felt suddenly queasy. And after that there was a horrible
crack,
like a symphony of broken spines, and for a second I thought I had done it, thought maybe I'd split the very building in two and it was about to come crashing on my head. I wasn't far off. I had enough sense to turn, pivot, and dive, as one of the biggest and oldest trees on the property came down on my handiwork. I choked up a mouthful of mud once the air came pulsing back into me, and when I turned over, I saw that the giant trunk had cleared my feet by only a few inches. The building was not so lucky.

This
was my sign. And for the longest second, as I got shakily to my feet and cleared the muck from my eyes, I thought maybe I had died under that tree, and I was now floating above the scene.

Because the gaping hole in the wall that the tree had just created seemed like a far more impossible outcome.

I crouched down and cleared the busted wall away by the handfuls, kicking the bigger, more stubborn pieces into desperate oblivion. And finally, there it was: my struggle had produced a me-sized hole, big enough to shimmy through, I figured, after measuring its width to my hips.

I got in close and peered inside. It was a tangle of shadows and nothingness, and I could feel a cool breeze reach out and touch my face, almost tentatively, before it withdrew and vanished. But whatever was in there — be it a mound of treasure, a band of misfits, or horrible disappointment — I was meant to find it. It could have been our moment; mine, Tabitha's, Paul's . . . and it would be. I knew it. This would be our last great adventure. They would see that I still cared, was still here for them, one more time before they made more plans without me.

But right now, this moment was mine. And so was whatever else that met me on the other side of that hole. After tucking the crowbar safely inside, I shoved my bag through the hole before getting down on my belly and starting to crawl in.

My hands made it in first, and feeling only empty air as I waved them around, I cleared my head through the hole, then my shoulders, and everything else followed through. I wriggled hard and, after a few seconds of panic at being stuck, and telling myself to
breathe
,
I was in.

Still on my stomach, I groped around and found my bag, and as I ransacked it, blindly searching for my flashlight, I couldn't keep my mind off the all-consuming silence. The noise of the horrible storm seemed like it had been absorbed by an ancient sound barrier, and my thick panting sounded like a roar in my ears.

I smacked the flashlight head, wishing I'd bothered to change the batteries before I left home today. It flickered, but wouldn't light. I struggled to my feet, knees quaking from the cold, until I stumbled out into the open, wheeling forwards and expecting to land flat on my face again. Instead, my hands met something square, ribbed, and wooden. My fingertips danced and touched and tried to read what I felt in the darkness, but sudden lightning served my need, instead. There they were: shelves, bindings . . .
books.

I fumbled with the flashlight, smacking it so hard the pain sang in my hand. I was desperate. Like a spooked horse, it sprang into action, and my small halo of yellow light revealed the unbelievable truth. In front of me were books, mountains of them, of every size and shape I could imagine, caked in dust. The shelves went on for dark miles, and emboldened by how all of this
had
to be a dream, I wandered into the centre of the massive room I'd wriggled in to, finding myself face to face with the huge rose window — the window that, in a dream flash, had been a giant, winking eye. Rain pelted it from the other side, where the real world ended and this one began. I stepped reverently into the dim, rose-shaped light the window cast onto the floor, and I realized what this place was. After sixteen years of dreaming, after a decade of enduring Treade and its deprivation of my soul . . . I had fallen down the rabbit hole and landed in a library.

I
swallowed hard and turned around in a slow, full circle, shining my flashlight out to scatter the shadows. Dust and cobwebs dominated the stagnant kingdom, a landscape that seemed to stretch impossibly; on the outside, it hadn't looked this big. And the
books
— it didn't seem like they had an end or a beginning, a head or a tail, and I wasn't about to find either and spoil the magic. The very walls were shelves, with balconies above, bigger case units below, and ladders to climb or slide along the shelves to my heart's desire. There were even untouched, austerely upholstered chairs tucked into reading desks, a place where spectres confessed dark deeds and ghosts cleaved to their books on philosophy, making little use of the green teller lamps covered in capes of cobwebs in front of them. I saw all of these shadows with a new clarity, and so much more than that. Because the more and more I saw, the more this defiant feeling germinated in my small chest: this was
my
place. And with this jewelled key to Treade's defiance in my hand, I could lock it all behind me and leave triumphant. The secret was mine at last.

But it was still a mystery, no matter how haughty I was. Ever since Paul got his first library card, he had tried to dig up any town records, photos, files, anything concrete to find out who the building belonged to (even before we felt it belonged to us). But all we had was poorly constructed hearsay, since the meticulously kept Treade archives had been burnt down forty years back at the hand of the archivist's scorned lover (quite the scandal). So no matter who we asked or how we persisted, we were waved off, shooed away, told to “mind our own business,”
and some, who were as ancient as the town and too slow to trust, said the place was cursed. That those who had owned it, who had built it, had never even been inside. “Rich folks and their secrets,”
they said. It was the breeding ground of endings.

Now inside, seeing with my own excited eyes what the walls had concealed all these years, the mystery didn't deepen — it dissipated. All bets were off. We had to start from ground zero, and all of a sudden I could picture the place lit up and alive, imagining that a long time ago there were people who loved this place, who were happy here.

The possibility flickered away in harmony with my flashlight. I smacked it against my palm and moved out of the rose outline, wondering how an entire town could totally ignore this book palace, and realizing that whoever claimed to have sneaked in here had to be lying; no one could have kept this quiet all these years. And the books . . . I trailed my hand from shelf to shelf, the gold foil stamping glittering when I wiped the grime away, the leather spines buttery and supple, too. I felt as though I was the first person to ever touch them, that each time my fingertips brushed across a book that it came to life, shivering to the depths of its saddle-stitching. I felt like I was on a mission to salvage every dreaming heart who stood outside of this building, or in Treade at all, who dreamed of something more.

After giving it another shake, my flashlight lingered dimly over a nearby ladder that soared up a free-standing bookcase. I think everyone who has ever felt that books provide sanctuary has dreamed of sliding on those kinds of ladders, little library birds darting from flower to flower for the hidden nectar at their hands. And I was no exception. Tucking the flashlight in the waistband of my jeans, I gingerly tested the rungs for splinters or faults, but my footing was sure despite my soggy shoes. About two rungs up, I reached out and snagged randomly, coming away with a gold-stamped cover revealing that Percy Bysshe Shelley was here, alive and well. “Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.”
Up higher were more of his contemporaries, along with the reams of the poetry I always loved and tried to share, but they were few and far between who could dive into the lines like I could, and swim in pentameter like a wave. Even past the mud caked in my eyebrows or the damp clinging to my clammy skin, I felt like I was being embraced by long-lost family, like I was coming home, and all my years of loving literature and being called out as a
nerd
or a
dork
were wiped away. They gave me strength instead, pulsing their verses into me like currents. So I kept climbing. Hemens, Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson beckoning to my occupied hands — one clutching the wooden bars, the other browsing. I gingerly wrested each book free, gave my noiseless respect, and shelved it again. And I climbed.

Suddenly, I had come to the very top of the shelf, and the end of the ladder. I chanced a look at the ground beneath me, only once, and I got the instant boomerang feeling of having come too high, too fast. I held on tighter and reassured my drenched feet that I was nimble and safe, and I was just fine where I was. Nothing could hurt me up here. I took my light out of my waistband, shining it around to see if I could find anything else brilliant before I started my descent, and something winked at me from across the top of the shelf. It was bound in bright silver, and it seemed like it had been discarded or simply forgotten where it lay, under a landing and just out of reach. I only wanted to see the title, feel the book's weight in my hands, and savour it. I put the flashlight down on the shelf top and, hooking my ankles into the rung, started to rock the ladder side to side. It was jammed at the bottom and refused to slide where I wanted it to, and I wasn't about to climb all the way back down to move it. Arrogance punctuated my struggle, and I started goading myself on.
Lean out a little
, I thought in a whisper.
You can reach that, come on.
Hands outstretched, ladder creaking underneath me, I gave it one more try. I lunged.

The second snap of the night, and this time not in my favour. As the rung broke underneath me, my wet shoes sent me wheeling in a backwards-forwards dance to get my balance again. I was forced to throw myself forwards and wrap my arms around the top of the shelf, clawing, one foot hanging free and the other still keeping a toehold on the ladder. I couldn't scream — I was too busy trying to summon to my cause every fibre in my muscles to scream — and with one bad shove, the flashlight tumbled to the ground to explode in a rush of glass and metal.

Panic does not begin to describe what went on in my head. My free foot kicked out in the dark, trying to find a place to land, while the other was losing the toehold. I was hanging onto the ladder with my pant cuff caught on the splintered rung, but even that eventually ripped free, and the ladder shot away in the other direction. Very suddenly, very vividly, I could picture the way my bones would break on the way down, marrow slipping out like icy gel to outline my gnarled body. I screamed, trying to keep my waking dream death at bay, and I clenched tight to the bookcase, reining in my hysteria, because I could feel the heavy shelf rocking with every precious movement I had left. I tried to reach for the ladder again with my toe. No go.
I don't want to die, not alone, not in the dark, in a place where no one goes for fear of a curse or because they've just stopped caring.
I could feel my joints popping and my sweaty palms slipping, the pain searing through my white knuckles.

Okay. Just focus.
I felt around underneath me with my foot; there had to be a bit of shelf I could plant myself on and use to shuffle back to the ladder. My toe whispered past a bit of wood, a bit of hope. That meant I'd have to let go a little and slide back, gently, so gently, to ease myself onto it. My hands started loosening up, inch by inch, muscles cramping with the effort. One hand caught on something sharp as it moved back, feeling like a bug bite, but I ignored it. I was nearly there, my foothold halfway to secure. The sharp thing on my hand was starting to dig in, to nearly cut the flesh, but I was so close it didn't matter.
Just a little more. A little more . . .

I lost my grip in one horrible instant, and my weight came down on the shelf too hard, too fast.
Crack
number three, the worst of all. I felt the air grow leaden as I fell, heard books coming free of the broken shelf and smashing to the ground.
Goodbye, Treade. I never had to leave you after all.

I jerked to a stop.

There was a hand around my wrist. An impossible, truer grip than I could have hoped for. I'd been caught from between the banisters of the landing over me, but it was too dark and I was too scared to look for the hero. All at once I could feel the hand pumping strength into my arm, swinging me back and forth until I could follow the path of the momentum onto the ladder — it was closer than panic had me think. Before I could register a single thought, I was scuttling down the ladder to the safety of the ground, rungs breaking with each frenzied step, until I stumbled and fell mere inches instead of several feet. Amidst the shards of my flashlight and the poor, ransacked books, I was alive.

I caught myself on my hands and knees, but a shock of pain raced up my arm and made me collapse all over again. Whatever had been nagging at my hand on the top of the shelf had burrowed its way under the skin, the pain buzzing all the way to my wrist. Sitting up and poking it as much as the furious pain would allow, my bleeding, sticky hand revealed a huge blade of wood lodged in the wound.

The silence, which had since settled around me like a heavy cape, suddenly burst apart. The sound started low, and for a second I thought it was just the rain, but it became louder, and way more intentional. Footsteps. Frantic ones. Ones that weren't mine. I twitched towards the source, but the echoing steps sounded like a thousand feet at once. This had all happened so fast; nearly dead to alive and bleeding, I didn't stop to think that it could've been my invisible saviour. Instead, it sounded like the racing of an angry guard dog coming to claim the trespasser. My usually vivid imagination had given me enough fuel to make a break for it, and I was on my feet twisting and turning, feeling my way back out and into the world. An ear-piercing buzz made me stop short as every light in the room, lights I did not realize even existed, raged to life, blinding me worse than the dark had but revealing my exit and the bag I'd left behind. I'd pushed it under the small coffee table that hid my hole-in-the-wall, and snatching it up I dove towards the free air.

I had my hands so far out into the opening that I could feel the cool mud beyond. But as I reached, there was a hand on my ankle. Then another, pulling on my skin like it was reeling in the catch of the day. I clawed for my opening, but it was gone, and I was dragged back into the library, the orange light burning my vision to a blur. But I didn't come out feebly; I came out swinging.

The crowbar clanged in my attacker's direction and bounced off the place in the floor where he'd just been crouching. He moved like a shade, a bigger and stronger shade, and he dodged my next desperately inaccurate blow. No sooner than I had got up, I slipped and hit the ground, my weapon spiralling away. I was pinned in a corner with only bookshelves at my back.

“Don't even think about it!” I rasped, trying to keep him at bay with words of completely feigned fearlessness. “Get away from me!”

But he was moving closer as I plastered myself against the wall, leaving a streak of blood pumping from my wounded hand behind me. I was weak despite the adrenaline, and tired. And without anywhere to run, I looked up, tears finally making their coarse cameo. Through them, I saw there was a face above me, the shadows on his features scattering as I looked closer.

Past a curtain of damp, unkempt auburn hair, I saw a boy — well, more a young man — but he held himself like he was uncertain about being the sum of his parts. He stared back at me with eyes like shiny wounds above drawn, worried cheekbones. I drew my knees up and tried to study him, but I only shivered as he crouched down to his knees, eyes never leaving mine, and started to crawl closer.

“Stay away from me!” I warned again, this time less sure of myself. I unconsciously held my hand out to stop him, and he caught it in a python grip. I resisted, but he brought it up to his eyes and they softened, whatever suspicion had been there pooling at the corners. He looked at me and shook his head, worrisome.

“Just leave it alone, I'm fine!” I pulled my hand back in his moment of pity and cradled it close to my chest. He looked a bit bewildered, but made himself comfortable and started digging around in his pocket, until he produced a beaten-up green tin with a faded cross on the lid. He sidled in a little closer so he could show me the contents: gauze, a small glass bottle of what was probably antiseptic, some hooked scissors, and a big pair of tweezers. I winced and cradled my hand tighter.

“That's nice, but . . . no. Really. I don't need—”

Very gently, he put his hand to mine and held it there. And he looked at me just once, a stare that spoke volumes with his vocabulary of silence, and I relented. I clenched my teeth as he cleaned the blood away, as every poke and prod of his combination scissors-tweezers-pull-repeat made me want to shriek bloody murder and run. But he said nothing as tears pricked my eyes again, just worked in hunched concentration. He kept brushing his curly, disobedient hair out of his eyes, and I realized that he was just as soaked as I was. How he got in, I didn't ask. Who he was, I only pretended to wonder. Right now he was in the middle of saving me for a second time, and I was too quietly awed to be curious or afraid.