“Well, since you’re here, why don’t we have a look at your life? Aren’t you curious?”
“Not really.”
“Let’s see…”
We went through the door and for all I knew at that moment we crossed twenty miles to the other side of the city. We found ourselves in a chamber that was certainly very different from the one we had left, with plate- glass windows all around us, held in place by a lattice-work of steel supports. Maybe this was one of the airport terminals I had seen. The books here were on metal shelves, each one with a narrow walkway and a circular platform that moved up and down like a lift but with no cables, no pistons, no obvious means of support.
We went up six levels and shuffled along the ledge with a railing on one side, the books on the other.
“Matt Freeman… Matt Freeman…” The Librarian muttered my name as we went.
“Are they in alphabetical order?” I asked. All the volumes looked the same except that some were thicker than others. I couldn’t see any names or titles.
“No. It’s more complicated than that.”
I looked back at the door that we’d come through. It was now below and behind us. “How do the doors work?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“How do you know where they’ll take you?”
He stopped and turned to look at me. “If you just wander through them, they’ll take you anywhere,” he said. “But if you know exactly where you want to go, that’s where they’ll take you.”
“Can anyone use them?”
“The doors in your world were built just for the five of you.”
“What about Richard?”
“You can each take a companion with you, if you’re so minded. Just remember to decide where you’re going before you step through or you could end up scattered all over the planet.”
We continued on our way but after another couple of minutes, the Librarian suddenly stopped, reached up and took out a book. “Here you are,” he said. “This is you.”
I looked at the book suspiciously. Like all the others it was oversized, bound in some grey fabric, old but perhaps never read. It looked more like a school book than a novel or a biography. I noticed that it had fewer pages than many of the others.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” The Librarian seemed disappointed that I wasn’t more impressed.
“That’s my whole life?”
“Yes.”
“My whole life up to now…”
“Up to now and all the way to the end.”
The thought of that made my head swim. “Does it say when I die?”
“The book is all about you, Matt,” the Librarian explained patiently. “Inside its pages you will find everything you have ever done and everything you will do. Do you want to know when you next meet the Old Ones? You can read it here. And yes, it will tell you exactly when you will die and in what manner.”
“Are you telling me that someone has written down everything that happens to me before it happens?” I know that was exactly what he had just said but I had to get my head around it.
“Yes.” He nodded.
“Then that means that I’ve got no choice. Everything I do has already been decided.”
“Yes, Matt. But you have to remember, it was decided by you.”
“But my decisions don’t mean anything!” I pointed at the book and suddenly I was beginning to hate the sight of it. “Whatever I do in my life, the end is still going to be the same. It’s already been written.”
“Do you want to read it?” the Librarian asked.
“No!” I shook my head. “Put it away. I don’t want to see it.”
“That’s your choice,” the Librarian said with a sly smile. He slid the book back into the space it had come from. But I had one last question.
“Who wrote the book?” I asked.
“There is no author listed. All the books in the library are anonymous. That’s one of the reasons why it makes them so hard to catalogue.”
I was beginning to feel miserable. The dreamworld seemed to exist to help us, but every time we came here it was simply confusing. Jamie and Pedro had both found this too. “You call yourself a librarian,” I snapped at the man. “So why can’t you be more helpful? Why don’t you have any answers?”
He tapped the spine of the book. “All the answers are here,” he said. “But you just refused to look at them.”
“Then answer me this one question. Am I going to win or lose?”
“Win or lose?”
“Against the Old Ones.” I swallowed. “Am I going to get killed?”
“We are experiencing some turbulence…”
The Librarian was still looking at me, but he hadn’t spoken those words. With a sense of frustration, I felt myself being sucked away. There was someone leaning over me. A member of the cabin crew.
“I’m sorry I’ve had to wake you up,” she said. “The captain has put on the seat belt sign.”
I looked at my watch. We still had four more hours in the air. Richard and Jamie were asleep but I knew I wouldn’t be able to join them. I took out my notepad and started writing again.
Four hours until London.
Soon we will be home.
CROSSING PATHS
Scarlett thought she’d be safe, back at school. She’d slip back into the crowd and nobody would notice her. After all, nothing exciting ever happened at school. Wasn’t that the whole point? So, for the first time in her life, she found herself looking forward to the next Monday morning. There would be no bombs, no strange men in cars, no cryptic messages. She would be swallowed up by double maths and physics and everything would be all right.
But it didn’t happen that way.
Shortly before lunch, she was called into the headmistress’s office. There was no explanation, just a brief: “Mrs Ridgewell would like to see you at twelve fifteen.” Scarlett was nervous as she climbed the stairs. In a way, she’d been expecting trouble ever since the trip to St Meredith’s. She had been the centre of attention for far too long and for all the wrong reasons. Her work had gone rapidly downhill. She’d been told off twice for daydreaming in class. And then there had been that terrible maths test. The teachers had already decided that all the publicity had gone to her head and Scarlett fully expected Mrs Ridgewell to read her the riot act. Get your head down. Pull your socks up. That sort of thing.
But what the headmistress said came right out of the blue.
“Scarlett, I’m afraid you’re going to be leaving us for a few weeks. I’ve just had a phone call from your father. It seems that some sort of crisis has arisen…”
“What crisis?” Scarlett asked.
“He didn’t say. He was very mysterious, if you want the truth. But he wants you to join him immediately in Hong Kong. In fact, he’s already arranged the flight.”
There was a moment’s silence while Scarlett took this in. There were all sorts of questions that she wanted to ask, but she began with the most obvious. “Has this got something to do with what happened to me?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what?”
“He didn’t say.” Mrs Ridgewell sighed. She had taught at St Genevieve’s for more than twenty years and it showed. Her office was cluttered and a little shabby, with antique furniture and books everywhere. A Siamese cat – it was called Chaucer – lay asleep in a basket in a corner. “You haven’t had a very good term, have you
