All around him the library was sleeping in the hot, still afternoon. Shafts of sunlight hung in the air like dusty curtains and a clock ticked somewhere in the distance, a ponderous sound that seemed to slow down time. Small footsteps crept along the floorboards above. That was probably his sister, Duck, investigating upstairs. But no one else was around.
Only Mephistopheles, the college cat, a sinewy black shadow with claws as sharp as pins, was sunbathing on a strip of carpet near the window —and he only cared about one thing: himself.
As far as Blake could tell, he was entirely alone. Apart, that is, from whatever was lurking on the shelf.
Slowly, cautiously, he ran his fingers again along the books.
'Blake!' his mother hissed. Her face had appeared from the office doorway. She was checking up on him — as usual, just when he was on the point of disobeying her.
Paula Richards, the librarian, stood behind her, smiling amiably.
'What did I tell you?' his mother scolded him. 'You're not to touch the books. They're fragile, rare and in some cases extremely valuable. Now pick up that book carefully and go find your sister. I won't be much longer.'
Blake looked down, surprised. There, in front of him, face down on the floor, was an unremarkable brown leather volume he hadn't noticed before. It seemed to be waiting for him to turn it over.
His mother apologized to the librarian. 'I'm sorry, Mrs. Richards, but Blake's not what you'd call a natural reader.'
'Oh, I wouldn't say that, Dr. Winters,' said Paula Richards, happily. 'I sometimes knock the books off the shelves myself.'
She winked at Blake and then pulled the door shut behind them, so he couldn't overhear the rest of their discussion.
Blake liked Mrs. Richards. She was a boisterous woman who loved books and, even more, loved talking about them. Her thick glasses clattered against the desk whenever she took them off, and through them, Blake could see the words on the pages she showed him swimming back and forth like legs in a pool. Some letters bulged and curved more than others, but what fascinated him even more were the little indentations in the paper — like footprints in snow. They reminded him of polar expeditions.
Mrs. Richards made books seem magical, almost fun, whereas his mother turned them into work. She used them to test his reading comprehension and often quizzed him about his results at school.
He'd not done very well last year, it's true; but she wouldn't believe him when he said it was not from lack of trying. Things just didn't make sense anymore. It was as if the words started disintegrating the moment he looked at them. One minute they'd be sitting in a straight row like birds on a wire; the next, they'd take off like a flight of startled sparrows. He couldn't pay attention.
It was hoped that a short break in Oxford, during which he would be tutored by his mother, would give him a renewed focus. 'A fresh perspective,' his homeroom teacher had said, as thought the phrase encapsulated everything; but his mother had simply passed him on to other college officials who were also busy, and so he spent most of his time working on his own in the library or looking after his little sister. His mother was researching a new book and didn't have time to be 'disturbed.'
Blake bent down to pick up the volume that had fallen to the floor, but then stopped. A ripple of anxiety passed through him. Was this the book that had attacked his finger?
But that's impossible, he thought. Books don't do that. Besides, the cover of this book was chipped and cracked, scabbed like an old leather glove. It looked perfectly harmless. He shook his head. He was just being silly.
Quickly, before he could change his mind, he reached down and scooped up the volume. Then something else happened: the book realigned itself in his fingers — just slightly. The movement was barely noticeable, yet Blake was certain he had felt it. The book sat in his hand, a perfect fit, as though that was exactly where it belonged.
His heart skipped a beat.
Looking closely, he could see that two small clasps, once holding the book together, had broken and the strips of leather hung down like unfastened watchstraps. A silver prong, like a snake's tooth, dangled from one of the bands. Obviously, it was this metal fang that had pricked his finger. His knuckle throbbed with the memory and he sucked on the wound, where another bead of blood was forming.
There was writing on the cover, too, but this had faded so that the title was barely visible. The words were as delicate as the strands of a spiderweb, and he blew on them softly to remove a fine layer of dust. A name or title, pressed into the leather in unusual rounded letters, appeared before his eyes:
Endymion Spring
He opened the book.
His fingers were jittery, but even so the pages flickered of their own accord — as though an invisible hand had reached across time or space and was searching for the best place to begin.
He held his breath, amazed.
Some of the pages were stuck together, joined at the edges, unopened, while others unfolded like maps without obvious destinations. They reminded him of the origami birds he had once seen a Japanese lady making on television. There were no lines on the paper, unlike a notebook, and no sections to write in, unlike a diary; and yet there were no printed pages, so far as he could see, so it couldn't be a regular novel either. It was as if he had discovered a completely blank book. But what was a book without words doing in a library?
A faint tingling sensation, like the suggestion of a breeze, tickled his fingertips and he moved closer to the window to inspect the book more thoroughly. He thought he could detect minute ridges glowing inside the paper, as though the sun were shining through it, communicating something; but when he held the pages up to the light, hoping to find a secret message encoded inside, he couldn't see anything. The pages were like thin, frosty panes of glass. Unreadable.
Disappointed, he walked back to the shelf, stroking the paper absentmindedly. It felt softer than anything he had touched before. Like snowflakes before they melt, he thought — or, or, what precisely? It was an elusive feeling, a sensation he couldn't quite grasp. Yet once he had opened the book, he didn't want to let it go. It had cast its spell on him.
Obviously, this wasn't an ordinary book at all!
'What are you looking at?'
Duck had surprised him by sneaking down from the gallery upstairs. She clung, monkey-like, to the edge of a bookcase and studied him with a curious expression.
'Nothing,' he said, and abruptly turned his back so she couldn't see.
'You're lying.'
'I told you, it's nothing.'
'Since when do you like reading?'
'I don't, so go away.'
Duck rummaged through some of the other books on the shelf. She selected a few of the fatter volumes and took them to a desk, where she skimmed through them. 'Typography?' she asked, wrinkling her nose. 'Since when have you been interested in that?'
She showed him the frontispiece of the first book she had chosen:
'I'm not,' he said. 'This book's different. It was just in the wrong section, that's all.'
'What's it about?'
He ignored her and continued leafing through the volume. It's as if I'm the first person to have discovered it, he thought; or else it's the first book to have discovered me…
But that was impossible! Mrs. Richards must have looked through it when she catalogued it. He flipped through the volume for an index card or something to identify it, but there was nothing inside. Nor was there a label on the spine, where the librarian sometimes placed a number so that students could sign out books from the library. There didn't seem to be any record of this book at all. It was as though it didn't exist.
For a moment he considered slipping it inside his knapsack. Would it be stealing, he wondered, to keep a book
