'The nearest public toilets are located in the bookshop on the opposite side of the street just around the corner in the Covered Market,' said the porter, without looking up.
A student passed by, flashed him her card and rushed upstairs. Enviously, the children watched her disappear.
'Only readers beyond this point,' said the porter again.
'Come on, mister,' pleaded Duck this time. 'I really need to pee.' A pained expression crossed her face. Even Blake was beginning to believe her.
'Across the street or—'
'—right here if you're not careful!' exploded Duck, raising her voice.
The porter dropped his pen and stared at the children, astonished.
'Look,' said Blake, trying to defuse the situation. 'We're not allowed to leave the library, OK? Our mother's working upstairs and told us to stay put while she consults something. She'll be really annoyed if we're not here when she comes back. Please, it'll only take a minute.'
Duck squeezed her eyes shut, ready to burst. The man squirmed uncomfortably.
'Please!' implored Duck. 'I'll be quick.'
The porter checked his watch and then grumbled, 'Oh, go on, then.' He glanced at his steel thermos. 'Just hurry. My shift ends in a few minutes.'
'I can go with her if you like,' volunteered Blake.
'Fine. Just be off with you, the pair of you,' snapped the porter. He hurried them towards the stairwell and pointed them in the right direction. 'The women's facilities are upstairs on the left and the gents', if you need them too, young man, are downstairs. Just don't mention this to anyone. And, whatever you do, don't go anywhere you're not supposed to. This is more than my job is worth.'
'Thanks, mister,' they chimed together, and branched off in separate directions.
One look inside the damp, clammy toilet was enough to persuade Blake to wait for Duck outside.
He paced up and down the dim corridor, just out of sight of the porter, behind the old wire elevator shaft. Occasionally a dark, boxlike shadow drifted past, trailing a nooselike cord behind it. Spectral shapes moved up the walls.
Midway across the corridor was a heavy wooden door with several iron bands slatted across its front. It looked ancient and forbidding. A discolored plaque, adorned with black letters, suggested that something important was hidden on the other side: no exit this way.
A faint tug in Blake's knapsack, which he had concealed beneath his jacket, just in case the porter decided to search it, convinced him. Like a steady, insistent hand, it pushed him towards the doorway. There was no mistaking it:
He decided to take a look.
Furtively, he grabbed the large iron handle and twisted it in his hand. He wondered faintly if it would activate an alarm system, but nothing happened. The door swung open quite effortlessly, as though it had been waiting for him all along. A whitewashed passage sloped away from him like an industrial rabbit hole. His heart knocked against his ribs and his legs trembled.
Hearing voices, he hastily shut the door.
Outside, in the gift shop, a young man with auburn hair had replaced the porter on duty and was chatting amiably to a pair of tourists in matching windcheaters, who poked their heads into the stairwell and enquired about the size of the collections.
'Millions upon millions of books,' the porter was saying, 'all shelved beneath the ground…'
Blake ducked behind the wire shaft and crossed his fingers that the other porter had forgotten to mention the two kids in the toilets.
He glanced at his watch. His sister had been gone a long time. What was keeping her?
Just then, he caught the sound of soft, skipping footsteps descending from above.
'What took you so long?' he hissed when Duck finally appeared. She looked pleased with herself. He pulled her by the elbow, away from the porter.
'You should see upstairs,' she said unapologetically. 'There's this amazing blue and gold door, and a room behind it full of hundreds of old books. I mean, really, really old books. It's like another world in there. That must be the Duke Humfrey…I love it!' She fingered the wire cage and peered up into the gloom.
'Well, come on,' he urged her. 'I've found the way.'
Checking to make sure the coast was clear, he inched open the door and stepped inside.
'Where are we going?'
'Down there.' He pointed down the long white tunnel and felt his nerves tingle again with excitement. Duck followed him into the passageway and he quickly shut the door. It closed with a final, unexpected click.
He gulped. This time they had really done it. They weren't just creeping around the college late at night, but trespassing on private property, breaking who knows how many rules. They would be in serious trouble — if they got caught.
Yet the book was clearly leading them this way. He could feel it flapping and shuffling in his knapsack, wanting to be released.
23
Duck led the way.
'What are you waiting for?' she asked, her voice booming around the claustrophobic corridor.
Blake looked around him, vaguely disappointed. He had expected a dank dungeon full of moldering books and mummified spiders. This was more like a hospital corridor. Safe and sanitary. Even the floor was coated in a special nonslip substance. Beside them, running along the wall, was an iron cage full of writhing, twisting cables. He wondered what they were for.
At the end of the tunnel was a small steel door and Duck cupped her ear to it like a safecracker, listening for any signs of movement on the other side. Hearing none, she inched the door open and peered inside.
Shelves, shelves and more shelves. Shelves led away from them in all directions — like a maze.
Together, they crept into the adjoining room and crouched by a tall metal cabinet. There was hardly a book to be seen. Instead, hundreds of identical gray cardboard folders, each tied with string, stretched into the distance.
Blake gazed around him.
Below them was a grille, allowing them to see through onto another floor — and another below that. He let his eyes slip through the cracks. Red and gold volumes glinted dimly on the densely packed shelves like coals in an oven. There was no end to the labyrinth. They were suspended on just one catwalk in a great iron spiderweb. He was already lost.
The dim, dusty air thrummed with machinery. All around him he could hear the regulated clicks of temperature controls, fire detectors and security systems monitoring the collections. And beneath it all was an indistinguishable rumble, a mechanical thunder. An image of a Minotaur, half-bull and half-man, dragging piles of books through the heart of the library, flashed through his mind.
Overhead, copper pipes zigzagged across the ceiling like complex plumbing. Occasionally, he thought he heard a papery rustle inside the pipes, as though they were crawling with insects, but he shook off the suspicion. It was probably his imagination. Libraries fought an ongoing war with pests. Surely the Bodleian wouldn't allow any in its stacks.
One doubt, however, remained with him. Was there a CCTV camera somewhere monitoring their actions? He half-expected the porter to clamp hands on his shoulders and pull him out of hiding…but nothing happened. No one came. They'd been down here too long. The stacks, it seemed, were unsupervised.
Even so, he remained quite still for a moment, getting his bearings, trying to devise a plan. Duck was running
