Page 5 of The Bookshop Book

And digs in.

Around the edges.

Oh, he doesn’t like it, not one bit, but he doesn’t cry out, not him, carrier of the knife. He just bites his tongue.

There’s a pop, a surprisingly clean, simple pop, like a finger escaping a mouth. A pop and a wetter sound, and then the patter of blood as it spills over his lips and rains on his shirt, on his shoes, on the carpet.

He sinks to his knees then, with a long-suppressed groan. All business still, he pulls the eyeball further from the oh-so-recently vacated socket and, with his other hand, takes hold of what trails behind it. With some effort he pulls the two apart, placing the eye into his pocket. Then slowly, with both hands, he draws out, from the gory hole in his face, something longer and thicker than those with even a basic knowledge of human anatomy might have expected.

At last, at least twelve inches long and thick as a finger, the worm is out, the final slimy segments wriggling obscenely while the ring of sharp little teeth that so recently were torn free of the eyeball they had been sunk into now seek something new to bite.

A trembling hand places the worm’s wetness on the leather cover.

It undulates. O my best beloved, it wriggles and it squirms. It makes a perfect circle, an O. “O” for Ouroboros, the ring of Midgard, fine serpents both. It makes an 8, or an infinity. There was a snake in Eden, remember that? I do. But more, and seldom spoken of, there was when Eve bit into that apple, a worm. Perhaps only half of one? Perhaps the other half has wormed its way into humanity’s heart, for are they not sick with sin?

And there, it’s gone, sinking through the cover, burrowing, eating its way toward the core, and leaving no trace of its passage save a dark stain and the faintly glistening trail of slime, drying even now.

Our man, his task completed, gathers the remains of his strength, still with the worm’s poison running thick in his veins. He leaves the house as he came, less steady in his walking, with only a dozen drops of blood left behind on the office carpet to record his visit.

He staggers from our story now, a drunkard’s walk, vanishing into the night, looking only for a place to die.

And in the garden that your mother wrote for you, a sudden wind stirs the bushes, makes the branches dance in every tree, troubles every flower. A squall blasts across the greenscape, its violence as shocking as it was unexpected. In the house, Muse, lonely in her dreams, lifts her head from her pillow. She hurries to the window, clad in shadows and the sheerness of her gown, thinking that maybe you have returned, thinking maybe she hasn’t truly lost her child.

And in the very heart of the garden, where the white blooms crowd, petals begin to wilt and wrinkle and fall in a pale rain.

“O Rose, thou art sick,” a voice booms above the wind’s roar.

“The invisible worm,

that flies in the night,

in the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed,

of crimson joy:

And his dark secret,

does thy life destroy.”

Chapter 3

Rose

Rose tore her gaze from the worm’s mesmeric stare. With a shudder, she shook off the loops of story it had bound around her. She tore free of the claws that held her tight, her scream one of revulsion rather than pain, though it hurt her worse than she had ever been hurt before.

She ran, breaking through the willow’s rattling curtain. Behind her a howl rose, joining the storm’s voice until one could not be told from the other. She plunged on. The Wild Woods devoured her, wrapping themselves evergreen around her, leaning this way and that with the bitter wind. She splashed and squelched through mud, trying to keep the river in sight, her only guide out here where the wild things were.

At last, panting and gasping, she came to a halt and stared back at the seething rhododendrons that hid the path she’d taken. With her spine against the thickness of an oak, she took a moment for her mind to catch up with her body.

If not for the Rat’s brave resistance, clinging to the truth of himself somewhere in the midst of the monster he’d become, the worm would have already devoured her.

It had clearly found the connections by which she had crawled her way into this second world—a second book, if any part of the worm’s tale could be believed—and had followed her, burrowing its way deeper, from one to the other. What ruin it had left in its wake Rose shuddered to think of.

Rose hugged herself against the cold. She was dressed for summer in the garden. She stood now, tattered and torn, the ice in her veins, knowing that she must move. So she did, lurching into the undergrowth’s clutches again. The river, she understood, would take her out into the Wide World, a place that the Rat knew little about and had no desire to know more of. The Wild Wood might house many dangers, but at least they were dangers the river folk understood, dangers that those like Badger could face up to. The Wide World, on the other hand, could swallow you whole and not even spit out the bones.

Still Rose pressed on, knowing that what followed in her footsteps must be as foul a thing as the Wide World had to offer. She ran, warmed by her anger at what had been done to her and those she loved, and wondering, whenever the fear left any space in her mind, about the why of it all. What had she done to make herself a target?