‘Hallo! Esk, isn’t it? H-how d-did you get h-here?’
It was Simon, standing there with a book under each arm. Esk blushed.
‘Granny won’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I think it’s something to do with men and women.’
Simon looked at her blankly. Then he grinned. Esk thought about the question a second time.
‘I work here. I sweep up.’ She waved the staff in explanation.
‘In here?’
Esk stared at him. She felt alone, and lost, and more than a little betrayed. Everyone seemed to be busy living their own lives, except her. She would spend the rest of her life cleaning up after wizards. It wasn’t fair, and she’d had enough.
‘Actually I don’t. Actually I’m learning to read so I can be a wizard.’
The boy regarded her through his damp eyes for some seconds. Then he gently took the book out of Esk’s hands and read its title.
‘Demonylogie Malyfycorum of Henchanse thee Unsatysfactory. How did you think you could learn to r-read this?’
‘Um,’ said Esk, ‘well, you just keep trying until you can, don’t you? Like milking, or knitting, or …’ Her voice faded away.
‘I don’t know about that. These books can be a bit, well, aggressive. If you d-don’t be careful they start reading you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘T-they ssss—’
‘—say—’ said Esk, automatically.
‘—that there was once a wwww—’
‘—wizard—’
‘—who started to r-read the Necrotelecomnicon and let his m-mind wwwwww—’
‘—wander—’
‘—and next morning they f-found all his clothes on the chair and h-his hat on t-top of them and the b-book had—’
Esk put her fingers in her ears, but not too hard in case she missed anything.
‘I don’t want to know about it if it’s horrid.’
‘—had a lot more pages.’
Esk took her fingers out of her ears. ‘Was there anything on the pages?’
Simon nodded solemnly. ‘Yes. On every sssingle one of th-them there www—’
‘No,’ said Esk. ‘I don’t even want to imagine it. I thought reading was more peaceful than that, I mean, Granny read her Almanack every day and nothing ever happened to her.’
‘I d-daresay ordinary tame www—’
‘—words—’
‘—are all right,’ Simon conceded, magnanimously.
‘Are you absolutely certain?’ said Esk.
‘It’s just that words can have power,’ said Simon, slotting the book firmly back on its shelf, where it rattled its chains at him. ‘And they do say the p-pen is mightier than the sss—’
‘—sword,’ said Esk. ‘All right, but which would you rather be hit with?’
‘Um, I d-don’t think it’s any use m-me t-telling you you shouldn’t be in here, is it?’ said the young wizard.
Esk gave this due consideration. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think it is.’
‘I could send for the p-porters and have you t-taken away.’
‘Yes, but you won’t.’
‘I just d-don’t www—’
‘—want—’
‘—you to get hurt, you see. I r-really don’t. This can b-be a ddddangerou—’
Esk caught a faint swirling in the air above his head. For a moment she saw them, the great grey shapes from the cold place. Watching. And in the calm of the library, when the weight of magic was wearing the universe particularly thin, they had decided to Act.
Around her the muted rustling of the books rose to a desperate riffling of pages. Some of the more powerful books managed to jerk out of their shelves and swung, flapping madly, from the end of their chains. A huge grimoire plunged from its eyrie on the topmost shelf — tearing itself free of its chain in the process — and flopped away like a frightened chicken, scattering its pages behind it.
A magical wind blew away Esk’s headscarf and her hair streamed out behind her. She saw Simon trying to steady himself against a bookshelf as books exploded around him. The air was thick and tasted of tin. It buzzed.
‘They’re trying to get in!’ she screamed.
Simon’s tortured face turned to her. A fear-crazed incunable hit him heavily in the small of the back and knocked him to the heaving floor before it bounced high over the shelves. Esk ducked as a flock of thesauri wheeled past, towing their shelf behind them, and scuttled on hands and knees towards him.
‘That’s what’s making the books so frightened!’ she shrieked in his ear. ‘Can’t you see them up there?’
Simon mutely shook his head. A book burst its bindings over them, showering them in pages.
Horror can steal into the mind via all the senses. There’s the sound of the little meaningful chuckle in the locked dark room, the sight of half a caterpillar in your forkful of salad, the curious smell from the lodger’s bedroom, the taste of slug in the cauliflower cheese. Touch doesn’t normally get a look-in.
But something happened to the floor under Esk’s hands. She looked down, her face a rictus of horror, because the dusty floorboards suddenly felt gritty. And dry. And very, very cold.
There was fine silver sand between her fingers.
She grabbed the staff and, sheltering her eyes against the wind, waved it at the towering figures above her. It would have been nice to report that a searing flash of pure white fire cleansed the greasy air. It failed to materialize …
The staff twisted like a snake in her hand and caught Simon a crack on the side of the head.
The grey Things wavered and vanished.
Reality returned, and tried to pretend that it had never left. Silence settled like thick velvet, wave after wave of it. A heavy echoing silence. A few books dropped heavily out of the air, feeling silly.
The floor under Esk’s feet was undoubtedly wooden. She kicked it hard to make sure.
There was blood on the floor, and Simon lay very quietly in the centre of it. Esk stared down at him, and then up at the still air, and then at the staff. It looked smug.
She was aware of distant voices and hurrying feet.
A hand like a fine leather glove slipped gently into hers and a voice behind said ‘ook,’ very softly. She turned, and found herself staring down into the gentle, inner-tube face of the librarian. He put his finger to his lips in an unmistakable gesture and tugged gently at her hand.
‘I’ve killed him!’ she whispered.
The librarian shook his head, and tugged insistently.
‘Ook,’ he explained, ‘ook.’
He dragged her reluctantly down a side alley-way in the maze of ancient shelving a few seconds before a party of senior wizards, drawn by the noise, rounded the corner.
‘The books have been fighting again …’
‘Oh, no! It’ll take ages to capture all the spells again, you know they go and find places to hide …’
‘Who’s that on the floor?’
There was a pause.
‘He’s knocked out. A shelf caught him, by the looks of it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘That new lad. You know, the one they say has got a whole head full of brains?’
‘If that shelf had been a bit closer we’d be able to see if they were right.’
‘You two, get him along to the infirmary. The rest of you better get these books rounded up. Where’s the damn librarian? He ought to know better than to let a Critical Mass build up.’
Esk glanced sideways at the orang-outang, who waggled his eyebrows at her. He pulled a dusty volume of gardening spells out of the shelves beside him, extracted a soft brown banana from the recess behind it, and ate it with the quiet relish of one who knows that whatever the problems are, they belong firmly to human beings.