Matthew Skelton - Endymion Spring

Blake held his breath and listened.

From somewhere on the surrounding shelves came a responding flutter — the scuttling noise he had heard before. This was followed almost immediately by a murmur from high above and then one from the depths below. Pretty soon, the sound was taken up and repeated by hundreds of thousands of books in the library. Blake looked around him, amazed. The air was alive with books! Each volume was passing on its secret: Endymion Spring had returned!

Duck, who had pulled down one of the boxes from a nearby shelf, paused in the process of untying its wrappers to stare at Blake. Then she delved hungrily into the contents of the folder.

A sorry-looking volume with a bruised leather cover was whirring like a frantic insect inside the cardboard container. It made a dry scuttling sound — like a cockroach — feverishly spinning its pages.

Startled by the noise, she slammed the box shut and immediately retied the string, gagging the book, but not before the blank book in Blake's hands responded by fanning its pages even more urgently.

Blake could not believe his eyes. The books were communicating with each other.

Suddenly Duck hissed in his ear, "Shh! Someone's coming!"

He clutched the book against his chest, muffling it.

"Where?" he asked anxiously, straining to catch any sound over the drumlike march of blood in his ears. "I don't hear anything."

Duck held up a finger.

Blake heard it too. A series of short, scuffling footsteps, accompanied by a tuneless whistling.

They crouched even lower and waited.

Eventually a woman with wild, troll-like hair appeared. She was wheeling a trolley loaded with books down an adjacent corridor, stopping occasionally to shelve them. Fortunately for Duck and Blake, she was wearing headphones that buzzed in her ears like angry bluebottles. No wonder she hadn't heard the commotion.

The children eyed each other nervously as she approached and then breathed a sign of relief as she passed. Abandoning her still-loaded trolley, she opened the door to the underground passage and disappeared.

As soon as she had gone, Blake released the blank book and, pinning down its pages with his fingers, whispered, "Please show us where to go, but be quiet, OK? There might be more people in the stacks."

This time, the paper flickered more slowly and an extra large sheet unfolded in front of him. The veinlike lines he had seen before were visible, but illuminated from within, as though the book were lighting up a path for him to follow.

So this was it! The marks on the paper were a sort of map.

He watched as the lines bent and intersected with each other, branching off in unexpected directions, before finally stopping…roughly, he figured, where they were now hiding.

"So?" Duck breathed in his ear, unable to see the route it was revealing.

He said nothing, but waited for the paper to disclose the next part of the path. A glimmer of light grew on the page in front of him and unveiled a new section of the library: a narrow line surrounded by a network of shelves. He began to creep in that direction.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Just follow me," he murmured without turning round. "I think it's this way."

The book guided them through a series of intersecting shelves and a long, poorly lit corridor and then down an iron staircase, which clanged underfoot. Warning his sister to keep quiet, Blake passed through a scuffed wooden door at the bottom and entered yet another iron-grilled chamber full of books.

This far underground, the air smelled chalky and stale. Some of the books were coated in a fine layer of dust, as though no one had touched or opened them in ages, while others showed evidence of too much activity: bound with string like mummies to prevent their insides from spilling out. The shelves were made from thick black iron and extended into the distance. Scabs of leather littered the floor like the husks of dead insects.

Duck trailed her fingers along the spines of the books, mapping their path through the ever-deepening library. Inchworms of dust scurried away from her fingertips.

Blake was beginning to lose all sense of direction. For some time, he had been perturbed by a rusty, creaking noise pursuing them through the stacks. The noise grew louder the further they progressed — like a mechanical snake slithering along the ground. He could feel the hairs on his arms standing up like antennae, sending ripples of anxiety all over him.

And then he saw it. A huge motorized beast lurked only a few feet away, in an open area in the depths of the library.

Large, bronze wheels whirled round and round like the tireless cogs of a clock, every now and then propelling thick plastic containers, some loaded with books, along a conveyor belt beside it. The apparatus creaked and moaned, an ancient relic, but was still serviceable: books appeared and disappeared, transported from the stacks up to the reading rooms high above and then back down again.

"Quick!" said Blake, grabbing Duck's wrist and rushing towards a dark channel between two walls of shelves. "Someone's been here recently."

A series of footprints, like a dance pattern, lay in the papery dust surrounding the machine.

Heart pounding, Blake ducked between the rows of book-lined shelves. Cords dangled from the strip lights overhead, tapping him on the shoulder, but he opted to proceed in darkness — unobserved. Keeping his head down, he continued along the narrow passage, guided only by the blank book, which emitted a safe, soft glow.

Mid-way through the tunnel, he stopped. Books towered above him like an invincible army; shelves crushed against him. Yet for some reason the line in the map had reached a dead end.

Duck tugged on his sleeve. "What's wrong?"

Blake crouched on his heels, looking in both directions. "I don’t know. Maybe the book has lost the way."

Peering into the gloom, he could see a faint pool of light spilling onto the floor. A bare lightbulb blazed above a small wooden desk a short distance ahead. A battered chair with worn wooden arms had been positioned nearby.

Blake caught his breath. There was a black shape — a shadow — hovering close beside it, pressed against the side of a metal cabinet loaded with books.

Duck had seen it too. "Who's that?" she whispered, her eyes wide open.

Blake shook his head and reached out to hold her hand. Barely able to restrain the impulse to flee, he watched the figure closely.

The shadowy form showed no signs of life. It did not move.

Blake consulted the book. The map very faintly indicated that the path lay beyond this black figure. He could feel the sweat beginning to trickle down his neck. His mouth was dry. He had no choice. He had to edge closer.

Duck clung to the hem of his jacket. "No, don't," she whined.

"We have to," he hissed.

With trembling limbs, he crawled nearer.

The shape materialized into a black coat — a hooded gown dangling from a hook that had been secured to the side of a metal shelving unit.

Blake let out a sigh of relief, but his senses were on heightened alert. Someone had been sitting here recently. The leather seat was dimpled. He ran a finger over it. It was warm!

Wasting no time, he tugged on Duck's sleeve and they raced to the end of the corridor, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and whatever specter had been sitting in that chair.

The book seemed to have regained its focus and pulled them down yet another dark corridor, past a mound of broken furniture and through a series of ever-narrowing shelves, into the heart of the maze. They came face to face with a wall of solid steel. A dead end.

Blake scratched his head, confused.

"I don't get it," he said. "The map's pointing straight ahead, but that's impossible." He reexamined the twists and turns on his map, but they all seemed to be leading to this spot.