Matthew Skelton - Endymion Spring

His blood turned to ice.

The page in front of him was deep black, almost impenetrably so, as though a cloak of night had descended over the book and all it contained. Only a cusp of brightness like a gibbous moon shone through the upper right-hand corner of the paper.

Blake inhaled deeply.

Written in the darkness beneath were three words, etched in white:

"What does it mean?" gasped Duck, frightened.

"I don't know," Blake said, glancing over his shoulder at the dark colonnaded passages all around them. "Maybe the book senses something's wrong. I think it's a warning of some kind."

The tree behind them shivered slightly and dappled the ground with restless shadows. To their right stood the bolted door of the Old Library, its lion's teeth set in a silent roar. A gallery of gargoyles peered at them from the chapel roof, pulling nasty faces.

A noise like a hundred birds taking flight all at once rose from a nearby window, as applause greeted the end of a conference paper being delivered somewhere in the college.

Suddenly, Blake turned back to his sister. "Hold on. Are you telling me you can see this?"

"Yeah, but that's to Endymion Spring , is it?" she said uncertainly, her eyes wide with fear.

"No, I don't think so." Blake returned his gaze to the black page, where the ghostly message sent another chill through him. "Maybe the Person in Shadow is communicating with us somehow. Maybe he can see us right now."

"But that's impossible," said Duck. "Nobody knew I had the book. I didn't tell anyone, I swear!"

"Well, the Person in Shadow certainly knows we've got it now," he said seriously. "And I bet he or she'll be coming to us soon to get it."

"What are we going to do?" squealed Duck, beginning to panic.

Blake went very quiet. "I don't know."

"We could tell Professor Jolyon," she suggested. "Maybe he can help us."

Blake looked doubtful. "I don’t think that's such a great idea."

"Why?"

"Because his office is up there," he said, pointing at the tower of the Old Library, which rose above them. Its upper windows were a mirror of sunlit glass, reflecting the dark silver storm clouds slowly approaching. "He could be watching us right now."

Duck swallowed deeply.

"I don't know," he said again, shudders crawling all over him. "I don't know who we can trust."

The page in front of him flickered.

"Hey, wait a minute," said Duck. She ran a pearly pink finger over the surface of the paper and turned over one of the corners.

Blake, fearing she was going to try to rip out the infected sheet, raised a hand to stop her.

"No, look at this corner," she said eagerly. "There's still a piece of the book missing." She lifted the edge of the paper with her fingernail and he saw what she meant: the round moon shape was where someone had torn off a corner of the page. It was a small scar revealing the perfect, intact sheet beneath.

"How did that happen?" he asked, dismayed. "Did you do it?"

Duck was offended. "Of course not! It's the page Psalmanazar gave you. Maybe he put a curse on it — or kept part of it for himself."

Her imagination took off. "Maybe he's using it to spy on us!"

He scrunched up his face. "But that's impossible," he said. "Books don't work that way."

"Come on!" she remarked. "This book is hardly normal, is it? Perhaps the paper has other properties, ones we don't know about yet."

She thought about it for a while. Her eyes widened.

"Maybe the Person in Shadow can see what we're doing whenever we open the book," she said hurriedly. "Maybe someone tore the section from the black page a long time ago and kept it as an eye into the book, just waiting for you to find it. Maybe you accidentally communicated something when you discovered Endymion Spring the other day — and that's why you were followed to the library…"

Duck was about to enlarge on the idea when a shadow stole across the lawn, creeping over them. Blake just managed to conceal the book in his knapsack before looking up.

Paula Richards was glaring down at them angrily.

"There you are," she hollered. "I've been searching for you everywhere. You're worse than the cat!"

She clapped her hands impatiently and they both rose to their feet, wiping the grass stains from their knees. "I really don't have time for this. I promised your mother I'd keep my eye on you."

Like criminals, they followed her back to the Library.

A tall, familiar figure stood beside the table at which Blake had been working earlier. Jolyon.

Blake froze.

He eyed the professor warily: from the top of his heavily lined face to the tips of his long, inky fingers, which gripped the cream-colored book he had left open on the table. And then Blake's heart skipped a beat. It was as though all of the blood pumping through his body had suddenly reversed direction; the ground lurched beneath his feet.

The professor had a bruised black thumbnail, almost exactly the same shape as the missing corner of the book.

The old man looked up, catching Blake's open-mouthed expression. A frown forked across his brow like a stroke of lightning and Blake tightened his grip on his knapsack, protecting the book inside, unwilling to let it near the man. He glanced away, unable to hold the professor's gaze.

Jolyon, however, had seen enough. He slipped a piece of paper between the pages of the bestiary, closed the volume and pushed it gently towards Blake. Then he gestured Mrs. Richards aside.

Blake watched as they walked out of earshot. He knew they were discussing him. Jolyon pointed at the section of the library where the books had been ripped off the shelves and murmured something in her ear. The librarian shook her head and turned to look at him.

"Get to work," she admonished him quickly.

Blake glanced at the pile of worksheets awaiting his attention. For once, his homework seemed like the safest option. He was still reeling from the shock of the shadowy message in Endymion Spring's book.

Rearranging the sheets in front of him, he started circling all of the mistakes he could find, taking special pleasure in lassoing other people's errors. He didn't want to acknowledge the suspicions creeping into his mind. The black page was invading his thoughts. He'd been wrong about his father, his mother, even Duck…so perhaps he was wrong about Jolyon, too. Perhaps there really was no one he could trust.

He kept his head down and didn't look up once — not when Paula Richards, carrying a heavy stack of books, took up a post close beside him, nor when Jolyon, leaving the library, brushed against him like a shadow.

Blake felt like one of the animals trapped in the bestiary. He and Duck were seated at opposite ends of the dark polished table, unable to talk, let alone pass notes. Occasionally, Mrs. Richards scratched something in her notepad and he shuffled uneasily. Her pen made a disapproving sound as it scraped against the paper, and he imagined her ticking a box next to some new fault or crime he had committed.

The black page was tugging at his imagination, worrying him. The need to know whether the words had changed or whether a new message was waiting for him was irresistible. But there was no escaping Paula Richards's gaze. Magnified by her glasses, her usually sympathetic green eyes resembled Venus flytraps — and he was the fly slowly being devoured in the cage of her lashes.

Drumming his pencil on his worksheets, he looked around. A small pile of books was growing near him as Paula Richards scanned various reference works to do with Christina Rossetti, the poet Diana Bentley had mentioned at the college dinner. One of the volumes had devilish goblins and demons clawing up and down its gold spine, while another had a plain plum-colored wrapper with ink blots on the leather. Paula Richards had left this propped open and he could just make out tiny scribbles in the margin — tight, miniscule words that looked like old-fashioned embroidery.