by Chris Ward
As Wilhelm watched it, he realised he’d already developed a sense of fondness for the creature. Shame to see it gone so soon, he thought, as he slid the box under his bed and headed off to catch the end of lunch.
5
Library
‘For this year’s first-year school excursion, you’ll be going up north to the Bay of Paper Dragons,’ said Professor Loane, the second highest-ranked of the teachers, after Grand Lord Bastien. ‘The bay is thirty miles north of here, and the only place in Endinfinium where the dragons can be observed in their natural habitat.’
Benjamin glanced at Wilhelm standing two places to his left, as Loane droned on about what coursework they would have to do before embarking, and what they would need to take with them. Wilhelm, though, didn’t appear to be paying attention; he kept casting furtive glances at Miranda standing farther along the line, who, in turn, had her gaze fixed on Cuttlefur standing in the shadows to the right of the stage. Cuttlefur was flanked on one side by the wild Ms. Ito, and on the other by the wide Captain Roche who, even standing near side-on to watch Professor Loane make his speech, made the triumvirate seem lopsided by his sheer width.
The blue-haired boy, for his part, stood calmly with his hands behind his back, looking out at the assembled pupils. Whenever Benjamin looked up at Cuttlefur, his gaze, more often than not, seemed directed at the left corner of the group, conveniently where Miranda stood.
‘And finally,’ Professor Loane said, ‘we have a new pupil to introduce.’ He waved Cuttlefur forward. ‘This is, um, Cuttlefur, come to us from the year 2887. Cuttlefur, please say a few words to the pupils.’
The boy approached the front of the stage, leaned over the microphone, and smiled. ‘Thanks for accepting me into your school,’ he said. ‘It was quite a surprise to wake up here, but I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun together. Thanks.’
Bored applause from the boys was drowned out by frantic applause from the girls, none of whose was louder than Miranda’s. She turned to glare at two of the fifth-years, whose catcalls had made Cuttlefur blush. Glancing back at Wilhelm, Benjamin saw his friend looking despondently at the floor while pretending to clap.
‘I wish we were going for a month,’ Wilhelm said, holding up the information leaflet for Benjamin to see. ‘Anything to get out of this place.’
‘What on earth is a paper dragon, anyway?’ Benjamin said. The leaflet was tantalizingly vague, talking only about how these ‘dragons’ were to be found nowhere else on Endinfinium. Having seen plenty of monsters in the few months he had been here, Benjamin wasn’t too keen on seeing more.
‘Probably nothing to get excited about,’ Wilhelm said. ‘At least for a few days we’ll get to do something other than wander around the school. Plus, Dusty’s coming, so I can keep an eye on him.’
‘Has he given himself away yet?’
Benjamin still clearly remembered their run-in with Dusty Eaves in the cave of the Haulocks, the large, black, plastic sack-based cousins of the Scatlocks. Despite trying to capture them, Professor Eaves had later laughed it off as an attempt to keep them out of trouble.
‘Not yet, but he will, believe me.’ Wilhelm sighed. ‘And you know who else I don’t trust?’
‘Who?’
‘That new kid. Cuttle-what’s-his-name?’
‘Cuttlefur.’
‘That’s it. I wouldn’t trust him as far as Ms. Ito could throw him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He practically knows Miranda, for starters. All of us here are from years apart, yet they’re as good as brother and sister. That’s quite some coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘I guess, but Endinfinium doesn’t exactly follow any rules, does it?’ Benjamin grinned, giving Wilhelm a nudge in the ribs. ‘You’re just jealous.’
‘No, I’m not. How could I be jealous of a kid with blue hair?’
‘Some people think hair like that is kind of cool.’
‘Well, I think it looks stupid. Don’t you?’
Benjamin shrugged. While blue hair was certainly more interesting than his own tabletop brown, he had to show solidarity with his friend. ‘Of course,’ he replied.
‘See?’
‘Well, at least he won’t come on the school trip, since he’s a third year.’
‘There is that.’
In an attempt to change the subject, Benjamin pulled a map of Endinfinium out from the pile of leaflets and notices from Professor Loane. The school sat in the middle, perched on a line supposedly representing the coastline. It meandered south, past the river estuary, then a little way farther on. The Bay of Paper Dragons was indicated right at the top of the map, to the north. Benjamin sighed. It wasn’t exactly detailed. Whole areas to the east and west were blanked off, with no river source. The thick blue line just ran off the edge of the paper and disappeared.
‘Is this the best they’ve got?’ he wondered aloud.
‘Best of what?’ Wilhelm was now staring out through the window.
‘The best map. There must be a more detailed one somewhere.’
Wilhelm shrugged. ‘I guess the library might have one. Do we really have to go down there?’
‘Yeah…’ Benjamin shivered. ‘It’s a shame there aren’t any computers pupils can use to check. If we go together, it won’t be so bad.’
‘We stick together,’ Wilhelm said. ‘No wandering off. Say, do you think Miranda would want to come?’
Benjamin shook his head. ‘I think she was given the task of showing Cuttlefur around.’
‘Oh, the new kid. Right.’ Wilhelm nodded. ‘Perhaps we could bring him along … and leave him there.’
6
Cleat
The library was on the third basement level, just one above the Locker Room and two above the incinerators where all of the rubbish that could no longer reanimate was sent. It was set in a series of groaning, wood-framed rooms that could have once been part of a medieval mock-up cellar, all warping crossbeams and sinister, poorly lit alcoves where even the shadows wouldn’t run from a lamp. Shelves of old books, most of which had been washed up on the beaches or plucked out of the river and dried, filled every available space. A mixture of subjects and seriousness, seemingly at random, from all points in history. Benjamin found novels in the sci-fi section with publication dates of 2800 A.D. or beyond, so many of the mysteries of Endinfinium could possibly be solved with a large-scale blitz of the library. Unfortunately, wading through shelves of tatty history books was as boring for Benjamin as it would have been for any other twelve-year-old. And the library at Endinfinium, of course, was unlike any other.
With the exception of one small section—books written in Endinfinium itself—all shared a common theme: shabby and water-damaged, often incomplete. And they had a tendency to reanimate. Once a year, the library itself was sprayed with deanimation fluid to stop the walls from moving around, but at any one time, you could put your arm across the spines of a row of books and pick out one or two that were warm or even tingling. Some even shifted around, as if fighting to break free.
‘Look, there’s one,’ Wilhelm said as they turned the last corridor before the library’s entrance, a large archway with trellised doors. ‘Wow, he must be two hundred years old.’
The shuffling man carrying a basket of books looked up with a crinkled face framed by white hair, though his eyes stared right through them at the wall beyond. Stooped low, the old-timer stumbled past, clutching the handles of the wire basket in two gnarled hands as he headed for the stairs leading down to the Locker Room. As he got close, Benjamin and Wilhelm flattened themselves against the wall as if the vacant creature might turn full zombie and try to rip out their hearts.
‘Anywhere else, they’re cool,’ Wilhelm gasped while the man started down the stairs. ‘But here, there’s just something about them that chills the blood, isn’t there?’
‘It’s like they were designed with this job in mind,’ Benjamin said.
A team of cleaners worked around the clock, pic
king out books close to regaining a life of their own and hauling them down to the Locker Room, where kids sent for punishment deanimated them with chamomile-based liquids. Then the cleaners would carry them back up and slot them into the correct shelves.
The shock of the stumbling, near-lifeless cleaners only lasted for the first few days in Endinfinium, since they were everywhere, given menial work from cleaning to maintenance to preparing school dinners. Corpses of the long-dead, controlled by the same reanimation magic that permeated everything. Generally, they appeared across the river in the Haunted Forest, periodically collected and brought to the school to keep them out of trouble. However, while most could be mistaken for regular people, the teachers had seemingly placed a cruel trick on any pupils wanting to study in the library by staffing it with the most ancient, most ghastly cleaners, who stumbled through the dimly lit corridors like the ghosts of dead librarians.
With the cleaner out of the way, Benjamin and Wilhelm ran for the entrance, clutching each others’ arm for moral support. As usual, no other pupils were in the library, and the tall bookshelves led off in multiple directions, like the entrances to some vast subterranean labyrinth.
‘What do we do now?’ Wilhelm asked.
‘Let’s split up,’ Benjamin said. ‘You go left, and I’ll go right. Call out if you find the maps section.’ At Wilhelm’s horrified stare, Benjamin grinned. ‘Only joking. Let’s stick together. Left or right?’
As a wild-haired cleaner lumbered out of the stacks to their right, Wilhelm signaled left, and they hurried away as if fleeing from a chilling breeze.
Benjamin had only been in the library a handful of times, always with the rest of his class as part of a library study period, and it didn’t seem so bad when there were fifteen kids and a teacher wandering about. Now, it just seemed sinister, as if the lights might go down at any moment to leave them floundering in the darkness.
They were quickly lost among the bookshelves. The library had more than one floor, with several mezzanine levels at the top and bottom of rickety staircases, seemingly not connected to the walls. Dark spaces over the bannisters plunged into immeasurable black depths below the school.
‘Reckon if I toss a book down there it’ll make a splash?’ Wilhelm said, leaning over the corner bannister of one especially unstable staircase.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Benjamin said, ‘but you’ll get a thousand cleans if anyone spots you. You remember how these books are supposed to be priceless?’
‘Of course they’re priceless. They’re worthless. No one would pay for any of this junk. The smell alone is doing my head in.’
Everything stank of salt underneath a layer of chamomile, though it certainly could have been worse.
None of the shelves were labeled, so they quickly lost their bearings. ‘This is a waste of time,’ Benjamin said, pushing back into the shelf a book on eighteenth century postal systems. ‘There’s no order to anything.’
‘Perhaps we should just give up,’ Wilhelm said, tugging at Benjamin’s arm.
‘Maybe you’re right.’
They headed back to where they guessed the entrance should be, just as the shelf to their left creaked and a cleaner stepped out in front of them.
Together, Benjamin and Wilhelm gasped as the shaggy, grey-white mop of hair lifted and a pair of vacant eyes peered out of a partially decayed face.
‘Business?’ wheezed ancient lungs.
The boys exchanged a look. Cleaners, to the best of their knowledge, couldn’t speak. Something about that part of their brain having never returned from the dead.
‘Um …’
‘Louder. Ears … broke.’
‘Um … the map section? I’m looking for a map of Endinfinium.’
The cleaner grunted, then nodded to the right as though to indicate they should follow him that way.
He moved slowly, dragging one leg behind him, holding on to the bookshelf stacks for support. Benjamin glanced back at Wilhelm who mouthed, ‘He’s not a cleaner, is he?’ though he had no time to reply as the old-timer increased his pace like an old car warming up in the sun, jagging back into barely visible shelf stacks as if purposely trying to lose them.
Finally he came to a halt at a little wooden table that stood surrounded on all sides by shelf stacks.
‘Map section,’ the man said, stepping back against the wall to let them pass. As Benjamin nervously picked a book off of the shelf, discovering a map book of the Edinburgh sewage system circa 1920, the man added, ‘Left stack. Fourth shelf.’
‘Thanks.’
The wild old man showed no intention of leaving as Benjamin pulled a wooden box with the single word ‘WORLD’ on its spine and placed it onto the table. He lifted off the lid to reveal a folded parchment map like something out of a museum, aware of the old man’s gaze on the side of his face. Wilhelm stood on Benjamin’s other side, as if using him as a human shield.
‘Um, thanks,’ Benjamin said again, hoping the prompt would encourage the old man to move on, but when it became clear that he wouldn’t, Benjamin instead asked, ‘Who are you? You’re not a cleaner, are you?’
‘What? Ears … louder.’
‘You’re not a cleaner!’ Benjamin shouted, and even in a library where the three of them were likely the only living people, he still felt internally scolded for breaking the most sacred of library rules.
‘No need to shout. Name’s Cleat. Harold Cleat. Head Librarian.’ His lips wrinkled in the hint of a smile. ‘Only librarian.’
‘You’re not a cleaner?’
‘What?’
‘A cleaner!’
Cleat shook his bushy head. ‘Nope.’
‘Not one for conversation is he?’ Wilhelm whispered.
‘Um, Mr. Cleat, can you tell him how long ago this map was made?’
‘What?’
Benjamin repeated his request with another shout.
‘How long have you got?’
‘How many years ago was it drawn?’
Cleat shrugged. ‘No need to shout. Hard to tell. Time ain’t like normal time here.’ He shuffled forward, gestured for Benjamin to open up the map. He did so, spreading it out onto the tabletop in a plume of dust.
At first it was difficult to understand, having been drawn up like the kind of ancient maps Benjamin had seen in dusty old museums, although with strange markings and unfamiliar symbols. Then, when Wilhelm pointed to a thicker line that appeared to be the coastline, it all began to become clear.
‘We’re going to the Bay of the Paper Dragons on a school trip,’ he said to Cleat. ‘Where’s that?’
Cleat poked a stubby finger at a point near the top of the map. ‘Here.’
Benjamin leaned closer. The coastline cut into a tight inlet where something was drawn swimming in the water, though it was too faded to make out clearly.
‘Sea monsters!’ Wilhelm said. ‘Not dragons, sea monsters!’
‘One and the same,’ muttered Cleat.
While Wilhelm still talked excitedly about the dragons and Cleat squeezed out a few words in response, Benjamin turned his gaze inward, picking out the dark line of the meandering river in the hills to the west of the school. He put his finger on it, then slid it up toward the top of the map, but rather than going over the edge like it did on the map Loane had given them, it stopped at an abrupt black smudge, with a little space beyond it for more rolling hills.
He put his finger on the black mark. ‘What’s this?’ he asked Cleat.
‘That?’
‘Yes.’
‘River source.’
Benjamin stared at him, frustrated, his old anger beginning to rise. Too many questions, not enough answers.
‘But what kind of river source is it? Like a spring or something? Doesn’t look like it just fades into nothing like a normal river should.’
‘Culvert.’
‘A what?’
‘Culvert.’ Cleat made a pouring gesture with his hands. ‘Water comes out. Makes river.’
‘What’s on the other side of the culvert?’
‘What go in.’
‘Where from?’
Cleat looked up at him and a steady smile spread across his wizened old face. ‘Head librarian,’ he said, poking a bent finger at his own chest. ‘No architect.’
Finally the old man thought of something else to do, and he stumped off into the shelf stacks. Benjamin stared at the map for a long time, even after Wilhelm had gotten bored and wandered off to look for comic books.
Benjamin was still staring at the map when Cleat reappeared clutching something big and dusty in his hands, which he dumped onto the table, and a plume of dust made Benjamin cough.
It was a thick book with parchment pages. Cleat opened it to a place somewhere in the middle bookmarked with a ruler to a page covered in handwritten text, nearly impossible to read.
‘Sixty-four years,’ Cleat whispered, leaning forward, and Benjamin smelt musty carrots on his breath as if the old man chewed them straight out of the ground. ‘We all come here young, like the old don’t believe enough to make it. I was like you, once. Dreaming of a way out. Still am. Just too old now, even if I do find something.’ Cleat grinned suddenly, mouth widening against rows of irregular-shaped teeth, as if he’d stolen them from the dead and had arranged them in the dark. ‘Say Cleat’s mad, some do. All these years holed up in this dusty place, picking through books no one wants, only the cleaners for company while just one step away from being one myself.’ Cleat gave an exaggerated shake of his head. ‘Not mad, just persistent.’
Benjamin looked down at the book Cleat held open. He squinted at it, trying to get the faded grey script to form into words.