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Pages & Co. Bookwandering Adventures – Volume One
As Tilly went to knock she couldn’t help but notice that the next door along, Chalk’s office, was not lit up. She paused with her hand in the air, about to knock on Amelia’s door, before pulling it back and putting her ear against Chalk’s door instead. As she leaned against it the door clicked open and she tumbled noisily inside.
‘Enoch?’ she heard a muffled call from the office next door. ‘Everything okay?’
Tilly hurriedly but gently pushed the door closed and stayed as still as she could, pressing herself up against the wall of Chalk’s office. She heard Amelia push her chair back and open her door, and Tilly held her breath, but a second later she heard Amelia retreating into her own office.
Faced with Chalk’s empty office, Tilly realised she was acting primarily on instinct, rather than hard-and-fast clues, but she could not shake the uneasy feeling that there was more to Chalk than Grandma and Grandad had let on, or maybe more than they knew. His excuses for talking to her in Anne of Green Gables, or being in Alice in Wonderland, were setting off alarm bells and raising red flags, and Tilly had read enough books to know not to ignore them.
She switched on the desk light, which cast a dim glow and eerie shadows round the office. The room was pristine, with barely anything on the desk apart from a computer that was turned off, and a shallow wire tray with a few sheets of paper in it. Tilly flicked through them, and saw that they were all covered in lists of bookshops printed in tiny type. Some of them were crossed out with angry red lines, and some were marked with arrows or stars.
There were no photos or knick-knacks, no garish ‘Best Librarian’ mugs, no sign of personality anywhere. The only decoration was a large poster pinned to the back of the door titled ‘The Ordinances of Bookwandering’. As she looked closer she realised it was handwritten. As her eyes scanned the list, she felt increasingly nervous. These rules were devoid of the sense of adventure or wonder that seemed to fill Amelia or Seb when they talked about bookwandering.
‘One: Travel within a Source Edition without prior permission, training or qualifications is strictly prohibited,’ Tilly read. ‘Two: Entry to the Source Library, as above. Three: All bookwanderers should be registered immediately after abilities manifest themselves, otherwise travelling will be classed as wilfully illicit. Four: No bookwanderer is permitted within five pages of the end of a novel unless trained in Endpapers Travel.’
The rules went on and on, all seeming to ban something or other. Tilly shuddered and moved over to the shelves of fat ledgers that lined the room. She noticed they were embossed in small gold letters with the dates they covered and pulled one down at random. She saw rows and rows of names and bookshops and libraries, written in handwriting that changed every few years. Tilly ran her fingertips down the thick paper, down the records of so many different people and their stories, and wondered what adventures they had had. She liked knowing that her mum was in one of the ledgers somewhere, and that Grandma and Grandad must be in one too. Generations of bookwanderers all listed together in nearly identical emerald-green ledgers. She wondered if anyone other than Chalk ever looked at them.
As she put back the ledger she realised the office was not as entirely lacking in personality as she had first thought. At the back, tucked away in a corner, was a bookcase of the sort of books you might expect to find in a librarian’s office – novels, children’s books, classics, a large blue book of fairy tales. A colourful, messy mix of books. It made Tilly wonder if they’d judged Chalk too harshly after all; could anyone with a full set of Harry Potter novels be that bad? He even had a copy of A Little Princess, and Tilly felt her heart thaw an extra degree towards him.
Tilly forgot where she was for a moment and pulled down his copy; it was a different edition from her mum’s, which was tucked under her arm, or any she’d seen before at the bookshop. The cover was a simple black matte one with the title and the author’s name in gold writing. She flicked through the first few chapters, unable to resist reading the description of her father again, but she was instantly distracted by the scene in which Captain Crewe and Sara first leave the school, which was not quite how she remembered it. She was sure she hadn’t seen their cab swerve in the road to avoid hitting someone, but she was also learning that once you were inside a book anything was possible. But then she found another passage that she was sure was different in her mum’s copy.
She read it out loud under her breath to herself.
‘She went into the shop. It was warm and smelled deliciously. A young woman, wrapped in a warm cloak, stood at the counter, absent-mindedly playing with her necklace as she waited for the baker to finish setting out the piping hot buns.
“Good morning, miss. How are the children doing in this cold weather?”
“Quite well, thank you, Nancy. They’re all very excited about Christmas.”
The baker smiled warmly. “What can I get you then? Anything for the little ones?”
“A loaf of bread, and some of those tiny almond cakes, please? There are several sweet teeth back at the house.”
The goods were wrapped up neatly in waxed paper and the woman left the bakery in a gust of cold air as the door closed. The woman behind the counter noticed Sara, shivering in her thin dress.
“If you please,” said Sara, “have you lost fourpence – a silver fourpence?”’
Tilly slid the book back on to the shelf, and put her own on Chalk’s desk to check, confused by the differences. Perhaps she was misremembering the scene. Was her mum’s copy special somehow? But, before she could turn up the right page in her book to check, the door handle started to turn. She froze; there was nowhere to hide and all she had time to do was shove her mum’s copy of the book into her pinafore dress, thankful it had large pockets, before the door was flung open to reveal Enoch Chalk silhouetted in the hazy grey light, looking furious.
‘Come here, girl,’ he snarled. ‘I knew there was something strange about you the moment I first saw you.’
Tilly backed into the corner. ‘I’m s-sorry, Mr Chalk,’ she stammered. ‘I got lost and I couldn’t work out how to get home and your door was open and I—’
‘Enough,’ he interrupted. ‘No excuses. How did you get here, Miss Pages?’
‘Like I said, I was lost in the library and your door was—’
‘No,’ he said, tense with anger. ‘We will get to why you are in my office in good time. I want to know how you have come to be in the Underlibrary past closing hours and by yourself?’ He spun round. ‘Is your grandfather here too?’
‘No! No. I didn’t mean to come here,’ Tilly protested. ‘I promise. It was an accident. I was trying to get out of a book, but the page was torn and—’
‘What on earth is going on here?’
Tilly was faint with relief when she saw Amelia Whisper join Chalk at the door. ‘I thought you had gone home, Enoch. Why are you out in the corridor bellowing …?’ Amelia tailed off as she caught sight of Tilly. ‘Matilda? What on earth are you doing back here?’
‘She broke into my office!’ Chalk spluttered in indignation.
‘I know, I know, but, as you said yourself, we need to understand why she is in the library at all before we get to that. Maybe you could go and find us some cups of tea?’
‘I am not a tea lady, Ms Whisper,’ Chalk said coldly.
‘Well, perhaps you could go and find us one then, Enoch. Or, indeed, a tea man.’
Amelia guided Tilly into her office with a gentle hand on her back as Chalk stalked off down the corridor.
‘I actually have a kettle in my office,’ Amelia said with a smile, ‘but I thought we should have a chance to talk by ourselves. Tilly, it’s really important that you tell me the truth at this point, okay?’ Tilly nodded. ‘How did you get back into the library this evening? Did you hide somewhere? Is Oskar here too?’
‘No, we went back home, all three of us, I promise,’ Tilly said.
‘Okay, so your grandparents don’t know you’re here?’ Amelia asked.
Tilly shook her head.
‘Well, first things first: we need to tell them that you’re safe with me and they can come and get you.’ She picked up the phone on her desk. ‘Hello, Archie? This is Amelia. We’ve got Tilly here. She’s completely safe and is with me. We … Yes, yes, I know … We can talk about this later, but the most important thing is for you to come and get her. Yes … Yes … No. See you soon then.’ She put the phone down and turned to Tilly. ‘They’re on their way. And I’m guessing that your grandad must have filled you in a bit more about everything after you left this afternoon?’
‘A bit,’ Tilly said vaguely, remembering what Grandma and Grandad had told her about keeping the details about her father a secret.
‘It must have been difficult to hear about everything that happened eleven years ago. No one thought your grandparents did anything wrong really, but—’
‘What?’ Tilly interrupted. ‘Why would anyone think my grandparents had done anything wrong?’
‘Well, of course they didn’t take the accusations seriously – but because Archie was your mum’s father I’m sure you can imagine that there had to be a full investigation into how Bea got into the Source Library. Thankfully the Archivists weren’t involved.’
Amelia stopped, registering the look of confusion on Tilly’s face. ‘You look surprised – I … I thought you said your grandparents told you about this?’
‘I thought you meant—’ Tilly stopped abruptly. ‘They didn’t say anything about the Source Library. They just told me more about my mum being a bookwanderer too,’ she finished lamely.
Amelia looked at her intently.
‘So, what did my mum do?’ Tilly pushed.
‘It’s not really my story to tell, Tilly, but the headline is that she stole your grandad’s key to the Source Library because she was trying to access one of the books to change it permanently, and I’m sure you understand how troubling that is. But really this is something you should talk to your grandparents about properly. We both saw this morning that your grandad is obviously very particular about the way he wants to tell you these sorts of things.
‘In the meantime we need to get back to the matter in hand, Tilly. Don’t worry; you’re not in trouble. It’s just that only very senior bookwanderers have clearance to access the library via any route other than the King’s Library elevator, so we need to understand how you got here.’
‘I wanted to practise bookwandering,’ Tilly explained. ‘So I read myself into a book, and it worked completely fine, but when I tried to get out I saw that the final page was torn, so I just read the last bit that was there, and then everything went black and I ended up in an empty room down the corridor from here. I wasn’t trying to get here, I promise. I didn’t even know where I was to start with. And then, when I realised, I came to try to find you, or one of the other librarians, so I could get home.’
‘Via Mr Chalk’s office?’ Amelia quirked an eyebrow. ‘But we’ll come back to that. Can I ask which book it was you travelled into? Do you have it with you still?’
Tilly paused before handing over her mum’s old copy of A Little Princess.
‘Ah,’ she said gently, looking carefully at Tilly. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’
‘Yes …’ Tilly said, eyeing her warily. ‘How do you know?’
‘Well, Tilly, it’s no secret that your mum and I were good friends a long time ago. It’s why I wanted to speak to you on your own first, without Mr Chalk here. We met in New York. We worked at the same bookshop there. I haven’t seen her since she went back home, pregnant with you. Until your grandad brought you to the library this morning, you didn’t exist according to the bookwandering community. After your grandad resigned as Librarian, he and Elsie went off the radar. Everyone assumed that they just wanted a quiet life away from all of the bookwandering politics, and to try to take care of Bea a bit.’
‘Why does Mr Chalk seem so angry all the time?’ Tilly asked.
‘Well, Enoch is very good at his job, in many ways – he has a bit of a sixth sense for anything going awry – but he has a different perspective on bookwandering. He is fond of rules and I’m afraid your mum broke most of those rules. He thinks we should be far stricter about bookwandering: how we monitor it, how we regulate it, if there should be an age restriction, whether we should allow anyone to do it who demonstrates a natural ability. He’s written seemingly endless reports questioning what books and stories are really for.’
‘But stories are for reading,’ Tilly said. ‘Why do they have to be for something anyway? Can’t they just be?’
‘I am rather inclined to agree with you, Tilly, as are your grandparents, but that doesn’t mean everyone else is. With regards to Enoch I’m not yet sure that we can explain your appearance here in the Underlibrary. Somehow you were pulled back to the library and were able to get past the barriers we have to protect this place. I think we would be ill-advised to share this ability widely. In fact, I think the best plan is for me to handle it, and to try to avoid you crossing paths with Enoch again on this visit. Although I need to ask you, Tilly, why you were in his office?’
Tilly flushed. ‘I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have been. I saw his door and I just didn’t think. I was curious.’
‘We don’t keep the offices locked here, Tilly, because the library is so well protected from the outside world, but that doesn’t mean that you should enter people’s private spaces without their permission. I think you probably understand this. I will pass your apologies on to Mr Chalk.’
Tilly nodded and at that moment Amelia’s phone rang. She listened silently and then put the phone back in its cradle.
‘Okay, your grandparents are on their way. They’ll be here in about fifteen minutes. Do you have any more questions?’
‘Can I ask you about Grandma?’ Tilly said. ‘I know Grandad was the Librarian when he worked here, but Grandma said she worked here too before everything with my mum happened – what did she do?’
‘Ah, good question. Your grandma was our Cartographer. She worked in the Map Room where … Actually, would you like to see it quickly while we wait?’
Tilly nodded.
They walked back through the library hall, which was dimly lit. A handful of librarians were working at desks and another was dozing behind the main desk. Amelia’s footsteps startled the sleeper awake and she sat up straighter, wiping her mouth self-consciously with her cardigan sleeve. Tilly and Amelia went back out the other end, towards the lift, and stopped at one of the rooms Tilly had walked past with Grandad and Oskar earlier that day.
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