Authors: Skelton-Matthew
"I'll meet you here in about two hours," said their mother.
"Then we can do something special.
It's early closing today."
"Take your time," they replied.
"We won't go far."
She eyed them warily, her suspicions aroused.
"Well, be careful," she said, moving towards the south stairwell.
She showed the porter her reader's card and ascended the stairs.
While she wound her way up to the Upper Reading Room at the top of the library, Duck and Blake wandered over to the gift shop and pretended to interest themselves in the items for sale.
There were book-themed tea towels, book-themed scarves, book-themed ties and even more book-themed books.
Another porter sat behind a small desk in an overlooked corner of the room, close to a second stairwell that disappeared into dimness.
The children chose this as their best target.
Thankfully, there were plenty of tourists to provide them with cover.
Like spies, they leafed through the postcards and posters, all the while watching the porter carefully, trying to figure out the best route to the stacks.
Blake's mother had told him that there was a special lift transporting books up and down from the stacks, all day long, located in the north stairwell.
Each time you requested a title from the reading rooms, a
molelike
librarian scuttled underground and scurried through the miles of shelves to find it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he now glimpsed a rectangular shaft, encased in wire mesh, in the center of the staircase.
This must be the conveyor she had mentioned.
His heart galloped with excitement.
They were on the right track.
The porter, a surly-looking man with stubby jowls and hair the color of cigarette ash, was frowning at his watch, counting down the minutes until his coffee break.
A partially filled-in crossword lay on the desk before him.
Occasionally, students and scholars brushed past, unclipping their trousers from their socks and removing hard, beetle-like bicycle helmets from their heads.
They showed the porter their library cards and quickly ascended the stairs.
Those leaving had to have their bags inspected, just in case they were smuggling out rare books.
After fifteen minutes of waiting, Duck sidled up to Blake.
She looked worried.
"How are we going to get inside?" she said.
"He looks ferocious."
Blake was pretending to study a paperweight with dark medieval letters trapped beneath the glass like insects in amber.
He glanced at the porter, who had rolled up his newspaper into a baton and was tapping it against the side of the table.
A thermos stood on the desk beside him.
"Maybe there'll be a change in shift soon and we can sneak down then," he said.
Duck looked unimpressed.
"Is that it?" she sneered.
"Is that your plan?"
"Have you got a better one?"
"How about I ask if I can use the bathroom?" she suggested.
"There must be one somewhere inside."
She slid her hands between her legs and bobbed up and down.
"Do you need to go?"
"Well, I have to make it look realistic, don’t I?" she growled.
"OK," said Blake, doubtfully.
"It's worth a shot."
Together, they walked up to the porter, who frowned at them.
"Only readers beyond this point," he said automatically.
He unrolled his newspaper and tried to look busy.
"Is it OK if she uses the bathroom?" asked Blake, pointing at Duck.
"She really has to go."
The porter pretended not to hear.
He read a clue to his crossword, counted the number of squares and then tried to think of a word that would fit.
"Please,"
said
Blake.
"She's desperate."
Duck squeezed her legs together and grimaced.
"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.
A
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:
Endymion
Spring
was guiding him.
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.
Endymion
Spring
was coming home.
23
D
uck 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 her fingers along the cardboard folders, tempted to open them to see what treasures they contained.
"What do we do now?" she said finally, sidling up to him.
"I don't know."
He watched as a network of tiny red and green lights blinked on a circuitry board above her head.
Stop, go, stop, go...
"Start looking for the
Last Book
, I guess."