Page 4 of The Bookshop Book

She wanted to run, back to summer, back to the Mole’s house, back through the cracks she’d crawled through, back to the garden. But the Wild Wood beyond the willow’s bars had grown dark, the wind laden with moonlit snow, and amid the shadows, creatures prowled, their yellow eyes full of hunger and empty of everything else.

“O Rose, thou art sick.” The Rat’s paw closed around Rose’s forearm, dragging her attention back to him.

“Let go of m— Ahhh!” It was as if brambles had been bound around her arm, winter tough, thorns thick with malice.

“The knife led and the man followed.” The black spheres of the Rat’s eyes, just inches from her face, possessed her. “See him!”

And as though through a glass darkly, she did see the knife, reflected there in his gaze.

The knife leads and the man follows. A man, defined only by the whiteness of his coat in the pulsing darkness of the ward. A man following the glimmer of a scalpel. Red lights, green lights, blinking here and there, declaring pulse rates, oxygen saturations, breaths per minute, the pressure of the blood.

“Sharper knife, fewer tears.”

Silence, save for the slow mechanical breath of ventilators, the low and hopeless chiming of intermediate alarms—no one cares until they turn shrill—and from just one incubator, the weak cries of a newborn, too young for fear.

“Sharper knife, fewer tears.” It’s old wisdom, but though what it concerns has skin and beneath that skin many layers, it is not, generally, a phrase applied to babies.

The glow of an upturned monitor reveals his face in brief and garish shades of red and green. For a moment, just a moment, we glimpse him. Bland, boring, surprising only in the lack of surprise offered by such a one. Hair brown, short, untidy even so. We sense that he is pale, we see that he is tall, thin, past his prime, unwell. If the police were to question us later, we would have kept only two things for them: the knife, and the eye. One eye was bloodshot, bulging slightly. If both had bulged, we might not have mentioned either—we might have covered it all with some blanket such as “funny looking” or “off.” But it was just one, and we would offer it to the constable, pleased to have remembered even a single fact past the uncompromising edge that cut his path. One bloodshot eye.

The knife leads the man. He follows it through the neonatal ward where new lives struggle to stay. We watch as he peers into one incubator, then the next, the glow of each illuminating him. At last he stops, just as we thought he wouldn’t find what he’d come for. Almost the final infant in the long, low hall.

The knife has found its prey. And though the man must stand witness to its wicked work, we need not. You and I can turn the page on that sorrow, on the meeting of soft flesh with cold steel, on the meeting of innocence with experience.

Turn the page.

The knife was sharp—yet the tears were many.

The mother had been a writer. She had used words to shape order from chaos. She had cut works of imagination from the clay of the possible, and in doing so had fed herself, clothed herself, and even paid her bills.

In the wake of what had happened, her words ran out, water from a fallen cup. Bills went unpaid, clothes became a second skin, meals were missed and missed again, a husband misplaced. She stared and saw nothing. Stared at the wall, at the window, at that crack in the ceiling that always seemed to be getting longer and yet never quite reached the light fitting. She sat in the muted roar of the aftermath like the survivor of an explosion, shell-shocked, incapable, unable to manufacture sentences even when it might have helped to drive well-meaning friends from her house more swiftly than her silence and her staring.

It took nine months, a not untypical gestation period. Nine months before she picked up a pen. Not the keyboard, its sharp divisions, twenty-six letters, struck or not struck, cleaving one possibility from the next as a gem smith reveals the facets of a diamond. Not the keyboard, too clinical an instrument for such work, too surgical.

A pen then. A pen and the creamy leaves of a journal, leatherbound, a one-time gift from a husband who had never understood her art but had tried to. Properly a fountain pen should have led the way, inscribing in graceful arcs, venturing across the blankness of each page. But tears will lift such ink and make a sea whose only remaining legible message is that of sorrow.

A ballpoint then. A ballpoint rolling forward in its cursive line, running one letter into the next, molding a vision more softly than the keyboard’s cuts.

She set to building, and where she had built worlds with her words, and houses too, even the one that kept the rain from her head, she now grew a garden. And in that garden she wrote her daughter’s name: Rose Penrose. She wrote a mother for the child. Not herself. She had failed in her duty and deserved no second chance. She wrote the mother her child had needed rather than the one that the world had given her. She called the mother Muse, for once this tale was written, there could be no other story, and she set the garden around with flowers of every kind, and every good thing that she had ever touched or hoped or dreamed or imagined.

Around the garden’s edge, and at its heart, she planted her daughter’s namesake. Roses. Roses whiter than snow and more crimson than blood, with every thorn turned outward to keep the girl safe as she grew, and—

“And what?” Rose demanded, blinking, then realizing with shock that the Rat still held her tight within the cold prison of the willow.

“And then he found her.”

He comes, sniffing the air, prowling the streets, understanding that in some sense the keen edge of his blade has failed to cut the cord completely. See him wandering the rainswept suburbs in a jacket that is his size and still somehow does not fit. See him pause, stare at the lace-curtained windows of this house, then that one, standing too long, not caring about the looks from passersby, turning away only when the curtains twitch.

He is skinny now, his height revealed by his thinness. He shambles the length of a street, reverses course, returns to a house a third of the way along. A house with a blue door, curling gables, Victorian brickwork, its front garden thick with nine months of neglect.

It’s midnight and he has come back. He stood ten hours on the corner by the high street, gazing at the traffic, not a single shiver in him, though the rain had long since reached his skin. His eyes, one bloodshot and staring hard enough for two, seemed to focus on nothing, never twitching even as the number eleven bus swept by at six past the hour, every hour, all noise and light and a swirling wind that flapped his jacket like a flag.

It’s midnight, and when he sets his palm to the lock, the front door opens. The mother must not have locked it…He seals the street away, shuffles down the wood-tiled hall. The knife is in his hand now, leading him, cutting glimmers from the air, even here in the sleeping house, so dark with mourning.

There’s an office on the left, walled with bookcases, a jungle of potted plants, a lampstand—faux Tiffany—a dormant PC, an antique typewriter, arms poised, ready to strike, all of it given in hints by the city’s glow, bleeding through the sash window. He doesn’t turn the lamp on. He doesn’t need to see and neither do we. Truth is still truth, even in the dark.

There are two books on the desk. The copy of The Wind in the Willows is an antique. It’s partially hidden by the journal, whose leather cover is tooled with roses. He stops. He’s found what he sought and, though his blade led him to it, a sharp edge is insufficient this time. The book before him is a mystery, and mysteries, though they might be stabbed, do not bleed.

Thin lips pull back, revealing two irregular lines of dental neglect. A deep breath, hissing in over all this decay, a sigh. There are some deeds that give even this man pause. He puts the knife in the pocket of his jacket, and with both hands, with trembling fingers, he reaches toward his eye, the bloodshot one, the one that bulges ever so slightly.