Page 6 of The Bookshop Book

Cold night became, through the intercession of a cold dawn, a cold day. Exhaustion set Rose stumbling on legs grazed and bruised and scratched by the miles she’d covered. The river drew her on, its relentless flow loaning her energy. The woods thinned, faltered, and released her.

Only as she broke free did Rose understand the nature of the worm’s invasion, and the scale. Across the sheltering sky, beneath which the world unspread its wideness, a cloud worm writhed, staining the morning. And under such an invasion, neither the fields and hedgerows laid before her nor the distant glowering town where the Lord Smith ruled offered any place to hide.

Behind her in the forest, branches began to descend as if they were petals, hinged at the join. The glossy green of holly and of ivy darkened to black, and thick bark flaked away like diseased skin, exposing raw and weeping wood.

Rose fell to her knees beneath the weight of her terror. She had done her best, lived as she was written, filled the space between the strokes of her mother’s pen with life as best as she was able. But she could do no more.

If the honking of a horn hadn’t raised her head, she might never have lifted it again as she waited for the end. A motorcar came into view, careening wildly across the narrow road that had hidden between the hedgerows. It thundered, roared, and at last clattered to a halt just fifty yards from her. A stumpy, begoggled figure lifted itself from the driver’s seat, tweed jacketed, his necklessness not dissuading him from sporting a jaunty red scarf.

“Come here! Come here! Get in!”

Mr. Toad’s gesticulation didn’t falter the whole time Rose spent negotiating the rest of the field, as if he thought she might give up again if not for the beckoning of his webbed hand.

Rose clambered onto the running board, pulled the vehicle’s carriage door open, and collapsed onto the seat beside the Toad’s, her nostrils full of the engine’s stink. The motorcar, wheezing, clattering, and emitting steam and fumes in equal quantities, responded to its owner’s ministrations with a roar of annoyance at being roused from its brief rest. The collapse of the nearby forest hastened: the crack of branches falling and trunks splitting, loud enough to be heard above the engine’s complaints as Toad gunned it and crunched the gearstick. Black streaks in the green of the grass reached for them across the field like flowing oil, but already the wheels were spinning.

In the grip of a fierce acceleration, the motorcar jolted and jounced down the road. Rose held tightly to her seat as Toady’s cries of triumph vied with the engine’s.

“Where will we go?” Rose shouted. “It’s everywhere?”

“To the extreme!” Toad shouted back.

“That’s not a place,” Rose hollered.

By way of answering, Toad engulfed the accelerator pedal with one webbed foot, and the hedgerows blurred by. The wind beat furiously at them, cracking Toad’s scarf behind him and streaming out Rose’s hair.

“We can’t just outrun it?” Doubt lowered Rose’s voice to the point where the engine’s fury drowned it.

“Of course we can!” Toad screamed back, hearing her anyway.

Ahead, a humpbacked bridge spanned one of the river’s smaller tributaries.

“Oh dear me.” Despite his words, Toad coaxed yet more boneshaking speed from his vehicle.

“We’re going too fast!” Rose yelled.

But Toad, with only one hand on the wheel and looking down at his chest, didn’t let the pace slacken a jot. “Oh dear dear me.”

He pulled his jacket aside and lifted his waistcoat and shirttails to reveal the warty greenness of his chest where a dark stain, not unlike that which had pursued Rose through the grass, was spreading.

“We’re going too f—”

“I only hope it’s fast enough, my dear child,” Toad gasped, returning his hand to the steering wheel.

The morning’s strained light gleamed on Toad’s goggles as, staring ahead through the spokes of the steering wheel and the flat plate of the windscreen, he struggled to hold his line. “I only hope it’s—”

They hit the bridge and, in the same crunching moment, lost contact with the road…

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—

…and landed with a brain-shaking, heart-stopping, stomach-hurting jolt, slap bang in the morning of a summer’s day as pleasant as any you might wish for.