Page 7 of The Bookshop Book

“Where?” Rose rubbed her forehead. She’d hit the dashboard pretty hard, and one word was all she could manage. Both the engine flaps had folded back like the wings of a bird, and great clouds of steam obscured her vision of the road ahead.

Mr. Toad, whose rubbery flesh had already shrugged off his impact with the steering wheel, was unlatching his door with a cry of dismay.

Rose, still woozy, looked around, expecting to see worm signs, but the forest and the sky showed only verdant green and a blue the exact shade of a robin’s egg. She rubbed at her nose, suddenly aware of how close she had come to breaking it and losing teeth in the bargain.

“Toady?”

The Toad seemed far more concerned with the state of his motorcar than with the health of his passenger. She noticed that she was somehow lower to the ground than expected, and that Toad seemed unusually tall.

“What—”

Toad chose that moment to sink to his knees with a cry of dismay. Rose winced, pressed a hand to her aching head, and peered over the door beside her.

She saw one spoked wheel in the ditch, a second hanging in the hedgerow. The lack of a slant to her seat suggested that both wheels on the other side had also broken off on landing.

Behind them—a surprising distance behind them—she could see the humpbacked bridge that had launched them into the air.

“Where are we?” Rose asked.

“Here, of course!” Toad snapped. He knitted one hand into the other over a chest now clear of the stain that had previously been spreading across it.

“But— Where did— We were being chased!”

Toad frowned distractedly. “We were?”

“We were! And you said we had to go to extremes. And then you jumped the bridge.”

“Well.” Toad applied a red-and-white-checked handkerchief to his brow. “Well, that was a rather splendid piece of driving wasn’t it. Such a takeoff! Such marvelous soaring flight.” He looked suddenly distant and wistful. “Those magnificent men in their flying machines…”

“But how—”

“I jumped us into another copy. Same edition. Probably the very next one out of the printing press. Ratty would say it’s ‘not the done thing,’ and Moley would have conniptions, and Badger…well, let’s not talk about what Badger would say.”

“I don’t—”

“We’re on another shelf entirely, dear girl! That lowly bookworm thought it could get the better of me! Me, the magnificent Mr. Toad!” Toad looked ruefully at his steaming engine. “There might be some disruption on the other side too…”

“The other side of what?” Rose demanded helplessly.

“The shelf, dear girl! The shelf! Haven’t you been listening at all?”

Chapter 4

Red

You don’t get earthquakes in Werton, or in anywhere I’ve lived, or anywhere near those places. Those facts didn’t stop the ground lurching beneath my feet. I managed to open my mouth to protest just before dozens of shelves’ worth of old books broke over me like a wave crashing on a beach. The unexpected impact across my back, shoulders, and head, combined with another lurch, threw me to the trembling floor.

It went dark. I didn’t lose consciousness or anything like that. I just hunched up and kept still for a bit. Sophie calls it my turtling. Something I learned when Mum had her rages.

I became aware that the fire alarm was going off. Unsure of how long it had been ringing for and whether there actually was a fire or if it had somehow been shaken into action, I lifted my head, shedding open books left and right.

My immediate reward was a shriek and someone jumping back, slipping on the uneven book-carpet and falling on her bum.

“Oh my god!” The girl—young woman perhaps—put both hands to her face, sucked a breath in, and started laughing. “That’s some ninja shit, right there!”

Xavier leaned around the corner, frowning. “You found him then. I told you there was a customer back here.”

“What?” the girl shouted back. “I can’t hear you ’cos of that damned alarm I said you should turn off!”