Chapter 3
Lucy Pevensie, going into a wardrobe and finding a snowy forest on the other side, said, “This is very queer” (cue the snickering for post–baby boom readers for whom the word queer meant something different than in C.
S. Lewis’s day). Dorothy Gale, stepping out into Oz, gave a cry of amazement and did not say anything about not being in Kansas anymore (that was the movie, and Alix Watson is always ride-or-die for the book over the movie, thank you).
But a lifetime of reading about girls who get dropped into strange new worlds evidently didn’t prepare me adequately, because when I stepped through the door into mine, I didn’t say anything profound or poignant.
I stopped dead and sputtered, “Holy shit.”
The vast room unrolling before me could have been a twin to the Boston Public Library Reading Room, only .
. . more. The same intricately carved barrel-vaulted ceiling, but stretching out so far into the distance I couldn’t see the room’s end.
The same tall arched windows lining the walls, but these weren’t darkening toward night; they were deep green glass and glowed like blazing daylight through an emerald sun.
The same rows of long polished tables and green lamps, but every one was empty—not a laptop or coffee cup or open textbook to be seen.
The same tall shelves of books reaching down each wall and up toward the ceiling, but these books rustled on their shelves somehow, almost rippling.
“The books are moving,” I heard myself say aloud. “The books are moving. Okay.” I pursed my lips, nodded. “Okay.”
There wasn’t a single thought in my head along the lines of Am I going crazy?
or I must be dreaming. I wasn’t dreaming.
I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t high either (you need serious cash to afford the kind of drugs that will get you this messed up).
I was here, wherever here was, standing at the top of an ornate mahogany staircase that spilled a velvety green carpet down before me like a forest sward (this situation definitely called for a word like sward, another off my “words rarely called upon for boring modern life” list) and then branched off right and left like two embracing arms down to the floor of the .
. . library? Yes. This was definitely a library.
“Can I help you?”
A woman’s voice, somewhere around the vicinity of my right elbow.
Too low and raspy to be Elizabeth’s, and I had to wonder what Elizabeth was thinking right now—that I’d just disappeared into a Reading Room storage closet and vanished?
—but I couldn’t make my head do the one-quarter turn necessary to see who the voice belonged to.
I was still stuck somewhere on The books are moving, still drinking in the room below and finding new details to gawk at.
Halfway down the right-side shelves a book was hovering midair, and every so often a page turned as if someone invisible was reading it.
“Okay,” I said aloud. At the foot of the staircase where I stood was a massive globe in a bronze stand, only the continents weren’t the standard Earth continents and the carved waves on the globe were actually rippling.
“Okay,” I said to that too. The enormous clock didn’t seem to have hour or minute hands, so what was it actually counting off—
“I said, can I help you?”
And the smell. The book smell that was my favorite smell in the world, the smell that all libraries had, the smell that said home to me more than any home I’d ever actually had.
Most people had a different set of smells that made them feel at home: some mixture of Mom’s lasagna, the jasmine their dad planted at the front door, the floor wax their grandma always bought, the dog they’d had growing up.
I’d lived in too many places as a child to associate any smell with safety and security, so I’d latched on to the smell of books instead .
. . But the book smell in my local run-down branch libraries was usually overlaid more prosaically with roach killer or mold or the sweat of too many patrons in summer.
This smell here, this ambrosia I was drinking in, was a pure library smell: not just books but everything good in the world that went with books.
Old paper and beeswax and ancient polished wood, yes, but also the leathery smell of your favorite comfy reading chair; the delicious wafting aroma of the tea sitting at your elbow as you dove into your favorite book; the buttery deliciousness of the just-baked chocolate chip cookie you crammed into your mouth as you turned the pages faster and faster.
The smell of woodsmoke because you were reading in front of a cozily crackling fire; the smell of lavender laundry soap from the lambswool blanket tucked around your knees; the smell of a cat because in a perfect library you’d have a cat purring at your feet as you read the best book in the world in front of a crackling fire with tea and chocolate chip cookies on the arm of your perfect reading chair.
One delirious inhaled breath of that smell—the smell that somehow eased the perennial ache in my jaw and the faint throb in my temples, the smell that calmed my pulse, which had been anxiously humming all day ever since I heard the words card declined—and I was gone.
I didn’t care that the books were moving and the clock didn’t appear to be counting actual time.
I took another hit of that smell and I never, ever wanted to leave.
“Look, kiddo,” said the voice at my elbow. “Are you in or out?”
I finally managed to tear my eyes away from the spectacle laid out before me and look down at the woman at my elbow.
Look down quite a ways, because she was short: plump and seventy-ish, iron-gray hair in a bun, glasses on a chain around her neck, green cardigan.
“In or out?” she repeated, sounding impatient, and I realized one of my feet was still paused on the threshold from where I’d halted mid-step.
Back in the BPL Reading Room? Was Elizabeth going to come grab me by the elbow and make this whole dazzling space disappear?
“I’m in,” I gasped, lurching forward as if I’d been electrocuted, taking three more steps for good measure. “In, in, in, I’m in.”
All in. Right there. None of this “hero refuses the call to adventure” bullshit—I had no idea where I’d landed, but I was in with both feet.
“Pleased to offer you sanctuary,” said the woman, swinging the door shut behind me. I expected some sonorous clang, but there was just a quiet click. “Welcome to the Astral Library.”