41
It was a tight fit getting them all in the car the next day, pets included, but they managed to return to London without too much grumbling.
Julia demanded to see the characters that night, which risked some awkwardness between Aurelia and Oliver. She was surprised, then, when he was keen on Antonia’s suggestion that they try a few experiments with the characters.
“Experiments?” Aurelia asked warily.
“Yes, I was thinking we could try calling the shop and seeing if we can hear their voices better that way,” Antonia said.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Oliver said. “But I was wondering if we might try seeing them from outside the shop, through the windows.”
Aurelia looked between them, unsure whether they were joking.
“But you believe us, that the characters will be there?” she asked at last.
“Yes, but maybe there’s some way for us to see or hear them better that we haven’t tried yet,” Antonia said. “It’s worth a go, isn’t it?”
Aurelia felt a mixture of relief that they weren’t taking a step backward, and nervousness that—try as they might—the experiments wouldn’t work and they’d be disappointed.
Sergeant Cuff and other characters had told her, and she’d seen for herself, that no one but her and Julia could meet them.
But, she told herself, maybe there was some trick no one had thought of before that would work?
“Alright,” she nodded. “Julia and I can start in the shop at midnight and let them know what we’re planning.”
“What are we planning?” Julia asked as she joined them in the living room.
“We’re going to test a few things out,” Antonia explained. “To try and see the characters somehow.”
“Like how?”
“Maybe look through the windows… We’re not sure.”
“That makes them sound like zoo animals.” Julia frowned. “I need to work out why they’re here,” she added plaintively. “If you come into the shop and they keep disappearing, I’ll never figure it out.”
“We’ll just try a few things,” Antonia said consolingly. “Don’t you want us to get to see them, too?”
“Yeah, I do,” Julia acknowledged. “Let’s try a few experiments, then.”
At half past eleven, Aurelia and Oliver went down to the first floor of the shop on their own. He wanted her to explain everything that would happen that night before leaving her and Julia to it.
“First, a sort of cloud starts to come out of each stack of books,” Aurelia said, pointing to the table in front of them.
“It starts off whitish, like smoke or fog, but then as it gets taller, you can see words printed across it. The cloud gets maybe this tall,” she said, raising her arm above the table, “and then it sort of spills over onto the floor.”
“Then what?” Oliver asked.
“Then it rises up and it’s like a column at first, but then it stretches into each character and the words change into the character’s skin, clothes, and hair.”
She explained how the characters had described the feeling of being pulled from their books, and how they could sit and stand in the shop but otherwise couldn’t touch anything, including her.
“Do you want me to corral Biscuit and Fezz back into the flat?” Oliver asked as he watched Biscuit nosing around at their feet.
“No, they’re fine,” Aurelia said. “The characters have seen both of them in the shop before, so they’ve got used to them.”
Oliver paused, a smile on his features.
“They’ve met Biscuit and Fezz?”
“Mm-hmm.” She smiled back.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to this.”
“It’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”
“It is pretty cool,” he echoed, reaching out a hand to her.
Antonia and Julia came onto the mezzanine from the flat and joined them downstairs.
“Alright, Oliver—we’re peeping in the windows first?” Antonia asked.
“That was the plan,” he said.
“It’s nearly midnight, so you should get outside if that’s where you want to start,” Aurelia told them.
Oliver and Antonia stepped outside, and Aurelia closed the door behind them.
The blinds were down, so she raised them up and saw Oliver and Antonia on the pavement, looking up at the building.
She waved out the window to them and they waved back, then she walked over to join Julia at the Recommended Reads table to wait for the characters to arrive.
“Did you tell everyone I was coming back?” Julia asked Aurelia.
“Well, I haven’t seen them since the last time you and I were together, so no.”
“You haven’t? Oh…” Julia said, belatedly remembering that Aurelia had been busy trying to fix things with Oliver. “Do you think they’ll be annoyed they had to sit here on their own for a few nights?”
“No, don’t worry. I made sure they wouldn’t show up since I couldn’t be with them.”
“Wait… What? You can make them not appear?”
“If I’m not—if we’re not—in the building at midnight, they won’t come out of their books. So we can just stand outside for a minute or two, then come back inside to an empty shop. And the next time we see them, they don’t realize any time has passed.”
“Really?”
She nodded, then added, “And if we stayed upstairs for the night, they’d show up, but if we stayed out after midnight, they wouldn’t.”
Aurelia was about to go on, but they were both distracted by the arrival of the characters as the clock struck midnight.
She and Julia had been chatting with everyone for nearly thirty minutes when there was a knock at the door. They looked at each other, both confused for a moment until they heard Antonia’s voice from outside.
“It’s no good—we can’t see anything.”
“Excuse me,” Aurelia told Sergeant Cuff as she walked to the door.
Aurelia looked through the window at Antonia, who was cupping her hands against the glass with Oliver a few feet behind her.
“Nothing?”
Antonia gave a slight jump at the sound of Aurelia’s voice.
“No. I didn’t even see you come to the door.”
Aurelia turned back to look at Cuff, who lifted his shoulders with a bemused smile.
“I was going to just open the door and come in, but Oliver told me we should check with you first,” Antonia said.
“Oh, right. You’ve got to come back in.”
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to her that Antonia and Oliver’s plan would cut the evening short, since they couldn’t very well stay out all night, loitering in the square.
“Um, hang on.” Aurelia raised her voice to address the characters. “Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt. We have a bit of a situation. You remember meeting—sort of—Julia’s mum and Oliver the other night?”
There were nods and murmurs of agreement.
“They’re outside right now and want to come back in. And the only way into the building is through this door. Well, they could climb the fire escape in the back, but the ladder’s a bit tricky, so I’d have to go outside to help them. So either they come into the shop or I have to leave the shop…”
“Which means we must bid you goodnight,” Cuff finished for her.
“Exactly,” Aurelia said with a nod.
“Are you serious?”
Julia, who had been chatting with Kitty, now looked angrily at the door, where her mother continued to peer blindly into the shop.
“I know, I wasn’t thinking,” Aurelia told her.
“But we were just getting started!”
“We’ll have to say goodbye for now,” Aurelia said, not wanting to dwell on their poor planning. Then she turned to the characters and added, “We’ll see you all tomorrow night.”
After giving them a minute for their farewells, she called out to Antonia, “Okay, you can open the door.”
Antonia pushed the door open slowly, as though she might bang it into someone on the other side.
Aurelia and Julia watched as the characters snapped back into mist, drawn quickly back to their books as Antonia stepped across the threshold with Oliver behind her.
The light that always appeared with the characters went out, leaving Aurelia, Julia, Antonia, and Oliver in darkness.