Page 63 of The Bookshop Book

“Fuck this! And fuck all your clever talk. Stop this!”

“It has already happened. Time is not a ri—”

I stopped wasting my time on the so-called assistant and jumped. The pool swallowed me, and in the next moment, I was there in the circle I’d been watching, standing between Rose and the druid with the dawn striping the grass in light and shadow.

The assistant had said something about cleverness being myopic and wisdom having longer sight. I understood, as the druid came toward me with his blade, that I had been neither clever nor wise. My brain had yet again forgotten that I was a kid and had similarly neglected to devise any plan beyond standing there and stating my objection.

“Stop! Don’t!”

The druid saw me—I’ll swear it—but came forward exactly as if he hadn’t. I put my hands out, but in the next moment he was through me, and I don’t mean he pushed me out of the way like I wasn’t there…he literally walked through me like I wasn’t there.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience either. I felt…cold…and hot…and images of the stone circle and the forest and fires and flint and blood…all of them flooded through me at once. There one heartbeat, gone the next, leaving me shuddering.

I spun around to face his back. “What the fuck?”

“He cannot interact with you.” The assistant stood beside me now, neither of us drawing any attention from the wild-looking people watching between the gaps in the circle.

“He interacted with the Smith well enough!” I shouted. “And he’s about to fucking interact with Rose!”

“Rose is a story. Her rules are not our rules. And the Smith did not come here from the Exchange. He has broken time. It is a dangerous thing to do. And now the price has been paid. But this…this you cannot stop.”

I reached for the druid to show the lie of it all, but my hand passed through him with another flash of a world too different from mine to fit under my skin. “Stop him!”

“He cannot be stopped.”

I circled around and crouched beside Rose. I couldn’t touch her either. She had been rooted into this world more firmly than the Library and its pools had rooted me. “Why are they doing this?”

“It is a gift,” the assistant said. “As I told you. She was given knowledge of action and consequence. They believe her death will bring renewal. They think—”

“I don’t give a shit if they think it will keep the planet spinning or the fucking sun in the fucking sky…Stop them!” The fear that I could see in Rose was in my voice now. I could tell that she was trying to be brave, struggling with her whole being not to see the knife. I did the begging on her part. The crying. There was hardly time, but I screamed, and I threatened, and I promised. And finally, I fought the druid, and in my desperation, I found some weak purchase on his arm. His eyes widened, he showed his blackened teeth, he cursed and put both hands behind the blade.

“You are a crack in the world, Frederick Archer. You should not be able to do this.” The assistant, though her tone didn’t change, somehow injected the first-ever feeling I’d heard into her voice. “The destructive power of such paradox—”

I drowned her out with a scream of effort. And when I was done, it was finished.

—

Rose saw the Antler Man hesitate as he came forward and shiver like a deer dislodging a fly from its haunches. He reached her and knelt at her side. She saw the knife for the first time. A straight blade of knapped flint, thinner and shorter than she had imagined would be needed to take a life.

A kind of silent screaming filled her ears. As if, beneath the wind-torn silence, someone was howling. She kept her muscles locked, her limbs shivering even so. To fight him would shame her and achieve nothing.

The Antler Man spoke in a language more ancient and less understandable than the one his people passed between them, his voice calming, the voice of a man gentling a spooked horse.

The knife, the focus of Rose’s attention, hung between them, a slowly descending thorn of stone. A moment of confusion crossed the Antler Man’s face. His eyes widened. His arm strained as if Rose’s need to live was holding him back. He grasped the knife in both hands, face hardening, muscles bunching.

When his hands punched her chest, Rose thought that the knife must have somehow fallen from his grip. She felt no pain.

—

“What?” I tried to pull the knife free. I could feel its sharpness but found no purchase on it. “No!”

Rose lay as if she were asleep, as if she’d nodded off rather than been stabbed in the heart. She should be fighting, writhing, twisting with pain, anything to keep her grip on life, to take the next breath…

“No…” My tears ran as if I’d been saving them up all those years when I couldn’t cry for myself, hot on my cheeks, salty on my lips. “No! This is wrong!”

I leaped to my feet to confront the assistant. I no longer had the druid’s attention—only the assistant cared what I had to say now, and even then, “cared” was too strong a word.

“She is dead, Frederick Archer. She died a long time ago.”