The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

She trailed off. The path behind her was gone. The aisle continued for a few feet, then dead-ended in a heavy-looking shelf whose layer of dust clearly showed that no one had touched it for decades.

  Anger drained away, and fear came flooding back. Alice turned back to the cat. “Listen—”

  The cat was gone too.

  Ahead of her, the aisle came to a row of backless steel shelves, more like pantry shelves than proper bookcases, that were made into a nearly solid wall by stacks of heavy leather-covered volumes. The path turned right, paralleling this row for a few feet before turning again to head back in the direction it had come.

  What caught Alice’s attention, though, was the light. It came through the tiny gaps and cracks between the books ahead of her, casting vivid shadows. Someone, on the other side of those shelves, had a lantern much brighter than her own. And there was a sound, a very faint one, that Alice found maddeningly familiar.

  Slowly, she set her own lantern on the floor, and crept closer to the shelves. The sound grew louder, a deep droning, almost like an electric fan—

  It clicked. How could she have ever forgotten it? The fairy had sounded like that in her kitchen, its horrible yellow-and-black wings buzzing to keep him aloft. Alice put her hands against the wall of books and searched frantically for a crack to put her eye against. Small pinholes were everywhere, but all she could see through them was the floor or another row of books. She noticed a shaft of light from higher up where the lantern shone through, and stood on her tiptoes to try and reach it.

  “All right,” came a voice, and Alice froze, because it was the familiar rumble of Mr. Black. “What have you got that’s so all-fired important? You know it’s dangerous for me to come here.”

  “You worry too much.” The other voice was high and nasal. It sounded like the fairy, Alice was almost sure it was, but “almost” wasn’t good enough. I need to see. “It’s worked out so far, hasn’t it? As long as I have this, she won’t be able to lay eyes on me.”

  “She’s not the only one that needs worrying about,” Mr. Black grumbled. “Get on with it.”

  “My information confirms what we suspected. The book is here, I’m sure of it.”

  “I hope your information is more specific than that,” Mr. Black said. “I don’t know if you noticed, but there are a lot of books here.”

  “Patience, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend. And I’m not patient.” Mr. Black’s voice was low and dangerous. “You tell your master that he had better come through on his end of the deal.”

  Alice couldn’t quite reach. Her eyes were just below the level of the gap in the books, giving her a view of the ceiling but not the speakers. She grabbed the bookshelf and pulled, testing to see if it would support her weight. It didn’t so much as wobble, but the steel edges dug painfully into her fingers when she tightened her grip.

  “All in good time.” The thrumming increased in volume. “I’ll begin my search, and when I catch the scent—”

  “Send me a message first,” Mr. Black said. “This place has too many eyes.”

  Alice took a deep breath, held on to the bookshelf, and pulled herself up. Her feet scrabbled for purchase, but the book she’d been planning to stand on shifted underneath her and slid out of the way, leaving her to hold herself up with her hands alone. The steel bit into her skin, but just for a moment she could see. There was the short, misshapen body, and the fast-beating yellow-and-black wings. The fairy was moving away, following Mr. Black, and for a mad moment Alice wanted to shout after him. Anything that would keep him in place long enough for her to find a way through this bookshelf, grab hold of him, and demand to know—

  The pain in her hands was too much. She let go and fell, feet slipping from underneath her so she sprawled on her bottom in the dust. Alice lay there for a long moment, listening to the receding sound of the fairy’s wings and Mr. Black’s footsteps, and clenched her fists where the steel edge of the bookcase had rasped them raw. She was breathing hard.

  More footsteps made her look up. Emma was approaching, gray with dust.

  “Mr. Wurms told me to find you,” she said. “And bring you to him. He said to tell you that you should not go off by yourself, and that he is very cross.”

  The response that bubbled to Alice’s lips was very rude, and would have shocked her father. She bit it back, closed her eyes, and tried to steady her breathing.

  He’s here. The fairy is here, in the library.

  It wasn’t the time for anger, or wild notions. Calm, collected action. Alice got to her feet, carefully, and followed Emma back toward Mr. Wurms’ table.

  I’ll figure out a way to find him. Make a plan.

  Then I’ll grab the damned thing and shake him until his teeth rattle, unless he tells me what he did with my father.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SNEAKING OUT

  THE PRUDENT THING TO do, Alice knew, would be to wait. She still knew too little about the library, and even less about the fairy. She hoped that Mr. Black would send her there again to help Mr. Wurms, but he didn’t, and by the next day Alice was frantic. All she could think about was the fairy, and what she was going to ask him when she finally got her hands around his neck. By that night, she realized it was a choice between sneaking out to the library right then and there, or lying awake until dawn staring at the ceiling, and Alice gave in.

  She left her usual clothes behind and crept out her door wearing only a nightshirt and slippers. Mr. Black sometimes walked the halls at night, and a little shivering would be a small price to pay against the possibility that he’d catch her on her way out. It would be easy to say that she’d gone to the toilet and gotten lost in the dark—it had actually happened to her twice already—but that excuse wouldn’t fly if she had her coat and hat on.

  She brought with her a box of matches, a candle, a pencil, and a few folded sheets of paper. The latter, she thought, might come in handy if she needed to take something down, or perhaps copy something from out of a book. She’d considered arming herself with one of the pokers from the downstairs hearth, but she couldn’t imagine a situation where that would really make a difference.

  Getting outside turned out to be anticlimactic. The big house was silent as a tomb after the gaslights were turned out, and Alice found the back door beside the kitchens unlocked. She eased it open, gasping a little at the blast of chill night air. Gravel crunched softly under her feet, but that was surely too quiet for anyone inside the house to hear. She let the door close gently, touched the matches and her candle in her pocket, and looked across the lawn at the low, dark shape of the library.

  In the back of her mind, all the way from her room, had been a voice telling her she shouldn’t be doing this at all. It wasn’t just worry about being caught, by Mr. Black or Mr. Wurms. This was against the rules, a boundary Alice had carefully stayed on the right side of nearly her entire life. Just the thought of it brought up a picture of her father, and the look he’d given her on the very few times she’d strayed. It hadn’t been an angry look, just a sad, disappointed one, and Alice would rather have torn her heart out with her fingernails than see it on his face again.

  But, she reminded herself, her father was gone. He was gone, and if there was any possibility of getting him back, it lay across the lawn in that dark, windowless building. Some things are more important than following the rules.

  Aren’t they?

  She shook her head and started across the lawn, avoiding the path—it was visible from the house—and staying close to the edge of the woods. Not too close, though. The forest frightened her more than she cared to admit. The only forests Alice had ever visited had been tame, gentle things, airy well-tended parks, and of course she’d never gone at night. This forest was different, ancient and dark, and all she could see was a solid wall of black foliage rising into the sky to blot out the stars. Each gust of wind brought a rush of
whispering leaves, rising and falling like the sound of surf on a beach. The wind was cold too, cutting right through the thin cotton of her nightshirt. Her skin rose in goose pimples, and Alice hugged herself and wished she’d been a little less cautious in her planning.

  The library seemed almost a part of the forest, a great black hump of a building looming up among the trees like an ancient standing stone. She could see the gleam of moonlight on the great bronze door, and she hurried over to it. The big metal ring was so cold, her hand burned where she touched it, but she gritted her teeth and hauled, expecting the scream of protesting hinges.

  Nothing happened. The door was stuck fast; Alice might as well have been hauling on a ring set directly into the wall.

  Locked. But it couldn’t be locked, she thought. Emma certainly hadn’t opened it with any kind of a key, and she didn’t remember seeing a keyhole.

  She hauled again, harder. The door remained obstinately closed, without a hint of movement.

  Alice let the ring slip from her numb fingers, and it fell against the door with a clack. For a long moment she stared at the unyielding portal, not quite ready to believe how easily she’d been thwarted. A particularly fierce gust of wind tore through her nightshirt as though it weren’t there and made her shiver violently. Alice sank into a crouch, hands jammed in her armpits and teeth chattering, and felt tears springing into her eyes.

  It’s just the cold, she thought. She hadn’t cried when they’d told her her father was dead. I won’t cry just because of a stuck door. I won’t.

  All she had to do was walk back to the house, climb back into her warm, scratchy bed, and figure things out in the morning. Get Emma to tell her the trick to getting in. She turned, wiping her eyes with the back of one shaking hand. The path back looked even darker and more forbidding than it had from the house, barely a glitter of moonlight penetrating the canopy to show the way. The trees shivered and shook in the wind, like something alive, leaves and branches rustling with a hollow, skeletal sound.

  Something else was moving too, low to the ground, visible for just an instant as it crossed a patch of moonlight. It was a cat, a calico cat, whose white patches glowed like shining silver until it slipped back into shadow. It was heading along the wall of the library, back through the underbrush and into the trees.

  Cats, Alice thought. There are cats in the library, quite a lot of them. Are they cooped up in there all the time? Or is there a way for them to get in and out?

  Before she was quite aware of it, she was crashing through the bushes at the corner of the building, following the cat back along the overgrown side of the building. It was, she had to admit, a stupid thing to do. She lost one slipper almost immediately, and branches snatched and tore at her nightshirt and left long welts and scratches on her legs.

  At one point her ankle got stuck on a snag, and she had a sudden, horrid vision of being trapped there till morning, when Emma or Mr. Black would stumble across her frozen, half-naked body. All this flashed through her mind in less than a second, as it took her only that long to free herself, but it left her heart hammering. The only thing that kept her moving forward was the thought of all the brush behind her; going back would be just as painful as keeping on.

  Ahead, there was a brief flash of yellow, a pair of eyes glowing in the moonlight. The cat observed her crashing, clumsy progress, but it didn’t seem perturbed. Breaking into a small clear space where she could see it clearly, it wandered up to the wall of the library—

  — and vanished.

  Alice stopped in her tracks, blinking. She could have sworn she’d seen the cat step forward, into the wall, as though it were no more substantial than fog. But that was impossible.

  Fairies are impossible, she thought angrily, ripping her nightshirt free of a grasping branch and leaving a chunk of fabric behind. But I saw one, and now I’m here. What’s wrong with a cat walking through walls?

  She broke free of the brush and stumbled into the clear space, leaning against the rough stone wall of the library. Her legs were a mass of pain, and something had cut the sole of her left foot so that it hurt to put much weight on it. The hem of her nightshirt was in tatters, and her hair was a tangle of leaves and broken twigs. Her breath came fast, and in spite of the chill of the night, her skin felt hot and flushed.

  After a moment’s rest, she pushed herself into motion, feeling her way along the wall to where she thought the cat had been. The stone was solid under her fingers, all the way from the ground to as high as she could reach. In desperation, she slid her fingers in the cracks between blocks, looking for some kind of catch or hidden mechanism. Which is ridiculous, she thought, because how complicated could a secret door be if a cat figured it out?

  There was nothing but flaking mortar in the joints. Alice gave the wall a kick with the sole of her slipper, lost her balance, and landed heavily on her bottom among the stones and weeds.

  Somebody laughed, just behind her, nasty and mocking. Alice’s heart lurched, and she scrambled forward on hands and knees and pressed herself against the wall. It was suddenly very cold again.

  “It’s not going to work,” a voice said. “You can’t get in that way. Because you’re not a cat, you see?”

  Alice tried hard to make her tongue work, without success. It seemed to have fused to the roof of her mouth.

  “There wouldn’t be much sense in having a cat door if just anybody could use it,” the voice said. It sounded like a young man, with a pleasantly superior accent she couldn’t quite identify. “A cat door should only admit cats. It seems obvious, if you ask me.”

  Alice swallowed hard, pressing one hand to her chest in an effort to calm her frantic heartbeat. When she was sure she had enough breath, she whispered, “Who’s there?”

  “I am. Look up. That’s it, a little to the left, now up a little more, too far to the right, no, up, you stupid girl. There.”

  Trying to follow these directions, Alice stared up into the overhanging canopy of branches. One twisted, leafless limb crooked a few feet over her head, and she found herself looking into another pair of shining yellow eyes. A sleek feline body was only barely visible behind them.

  “You’re a cat,” she said automatically.

  “Your powers of perception are astounding,” the cat drawled. “Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.”

  “And you can talk,” Alice said, working her way through the situation.

  “Better and better! With brains like that, I can see how you monkeys took over the world.”

  Alice closed her eyes for a moment and took a determined hold on herself. You followed a cat in the library and it led you to the fairy, she admonished. Hearing one talk should not be such a shock. She could feel a tiny worm of ecstatic excitement, deep in her gut, and she tried to fight it down. The thing to do, she thought, is think about this logically.

  She opened her eyes, and realized she had absolutely no idea what to say.

  “I must say, if you’re practicing for an ‘impressions of lower life-forms’ contest, you’re a shoe-in. That ‘slack-jawed cow’ look is spot on. Can you do a giraffe?”

  “All right,” Alice said. “All right. You’re a cat, and you can talk. What are you doing here?”

  “A vocal reaction at last! But still not a very clever one. Under the circumstances, don’t you think it is I who should be directing that question to you?”

  “Me?”

  “I, after all, live here. I am a library cat, and this is the library, and so I am in my domain. You, on the other hand, do not belong. So allow me to put the same question on the table, in reverse: What are you doing here?”

  “I live here,” Alice said. “There, anyway. In the house. My name is Alice Creighton.”

  “I know that. But what
are you doing here?”

  There was a moment of blurred motion as the cat dropped to the ground, landing in a crouch. In the moonlight his fur was a dull, rippling silver. His yellow eyes stayed fixed on hers, but she noticed that his mouth remained closed when he spoke, the clever voice emerging apparently from nowhere.

  “Politeness demands,” he said, “that I introduce myself. You may call me Ashes.”

  “Ash?” Alice repeated.

  “Ashes.” The cat bristled. “Or, in full, Ashes-Drifting-Through-the-Dead-Cities-of-the-World, but Ashes will do.”

  Alice dropped to her knees, to put herself closer to the cat’s level. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “If you try to shake my paw, be warned, you’re getting a smack on the nose,” Ashes said.

  “Are you the cat I saw in the library this afternoon?” It was hard to be sure, but she thought he was the right color.

  “If I answer your questions, will you answer mine?”

  Alice sighed and stood up, putting one hand on the cold stone of the wall. “I’m trying to get into the library. The front door wouldn’t open, so I thought there might be a way in I could use around here.”

  “Not unexpected. It wouldn’t be much of a fortress if you just left the doors open.” Ashes yawned, showing tiny white teeth. “And what are you planning to do, once you get inside?”

  “I’m going to find that fairy with the yellow-and-black wings.” Alice decided not to volunteer what she planned to do to the thing. For all she knew, the cat could be on his side.

  “I see.” His fur rippled. “Well, fair is fair. Yes, it was me you followed.”

  “You laughed at me!”

  “You were making such a spectacle of yourself, I couldn’t help it.”

  “Why did you lead me to the fairy?” Alice said. “What do you know about him?”

  “Lead?” Ashes chuckled. “Cats wander where they please. Whether or not anyone follows is not our business.”

  “You—” Alice clenched her teeth and let a moment or two pass in silence. “Look. Can you help me get inside?”