Page 52 of The Bookshop Book

“On that we agree.” Hannah nodded.

“We have to get back…” The Exchange seemed to stretch to impossible distances in all directions, as if they had somehow descended into the midst of a vast, pool-studded orchard.

“I have a better idea.” Without another word, Hannah stepped into the pool just beside them and confirmed Rose’s impression of its depth by immediately sinking, not to her knees or waist, but entirely from view with the water closing over her head.

“Hannah!” Rose dropped to her knees. The splash had died almost to nothing in a tenth of the time Rose felt that it should. What ripples remained hardly spoiled her view of the crystal fathoms below, and in none of it could Rose see any sign of Hannah. “Did she melt?” Rose remembered the horrific effect of rain on a previous witch…

Slowly, Rose reached out to touch the water. A splash like a leaping fish. A white hand. And she was hauled in.

“No! Wait! No—” Rose found herself lying on a hard floor with a featureless ceiling an unknown distance above her. Somewhat embarrassedly, she stopped shouting and sat up, trying not to pant.

“Well now, what a way to travel!” The witch stood close by. “Welcome to the Library.”

Rose looked around. They were in a huge room, well over a hundred yards across, and with a ceiling so high you could build a church and have room for the spire. Desks were arrayed around her on every side, many hundreds of them, their order disturbed here and there as they stretched toward the distant walls of the chamber.

“It doesn’t look like a library.” She got to her feet, her heart still pounding. “And you could have warned me about the pool!”

“You,” said Hannah, “were more fun when you were a bud, Rose, before you flowered.”

“Life was more fun back then!” Rose humphed and folded her arms across the tattered remains of her blouse.

Hannah puffed air through her lips. “Perhaps you just need plucking.”

“What’s that?” Rose pointed to the structure that she’d missed until now by dint of having her back to it. The building resembled a loaf of bread, a rounded rectangle of the same gray stuff that the floor and walls were made of. It was approximately the size of Miss Havisham’s entrance hall. At one end it sported an iron door with a small, barred window, rather like Rose imagined you might find on a jail cell.

“That’s the Mechanism.” Hannah produced a wand from another pocket, a gnarled twig with knots like knuckles on a long finger. “I could say ‘a mechanism,’ since there are lots of them. But there’s also only one of them. It’s a whatdoyoucallit? Paradox. That’s the Mechanism.”

“It doesn’t look very mechanical.”

“I didn’t pick the name. Blame the author.”

“The author?” Rose frowned.

“You’re really not getting this…” Hannah started to draw some complicated design in the air with her wand. “Everything is written. You. Me. This place. That place. Everything.”

Rose shook her head, trying to rid herself of the annoyance Hannah kept putting there. “What are you doing?”

“Magic.”

“Yes, but what sort…”

Hannah stepped back sharply, lowering her wand. Some yards away, the air where she had aimed her enchantment now seemed somehow to…come apart…and stumbling out from some book-lined place that looked far more library-like than this one…came a man. The man. The tall, one-eyed man, with hunger enough in his remaining orb for a dozen such. The worm man.

The man grinned an ugly grin. “Found you!”

“Run!” Hannah screamed. “Not that way!” She pointed toward the cell door with her wand. “That way!”

Rose ran, though her mind told her that the door would be locked—it was that sort of door—and even if it wasn’t, it would slow her, and the man, this Gar, would catch her. But the door gave before her and banged closed in her wake. And she found herself running through the Muse’s garden amid the roses and gravel paths. As she ran, the sound of that iron door banging open once more pursued her.

Across the rose beds she glimpsed Gar giving chase, and the fear that filled her was somehow greater and more acidic even than that which the worm itself had poured into her with its stories and lies.

While he was not a young man, the length of his legs should have eaten up the distance between them. But where Rose had flowed through the garden, Gar struggled, the flower heads seething all around him as thorns snagged him and he had to tear himself free time and time again.

In the midst of his battle, ripping through the blooms’ protest, Gar fixed Rose with his singular stare, and she felt it like a lance thrust through her chest. She would have thrown herself to the ground to escape that stare, but even as she thought to do so, the roses surged skyward, flower beds becoming hedges, transforming the formal garden into something closer to a maze.

Rose stood a moment in wonder. The Muse’s garden had never obeyed her desire before.

“It’s generally not possible to enter the Mechanism without a book.”