Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
L uke had called the Yorkshire newspaper, hoping for further details on the bookshop fire. After the brief and unsatisfying conversation, he replaced the receiver and continued to look out of the window. He felt like he should be doing something, but with the Shambles Bookshop and its owner gone, he wasn’t sure what. Now there was the dead bookseller in Dundee, too, but an internet search hadn’t thrown up any new information. Fraser of Jute Books didn’t have much of an online footprint. He hadn’t found a news story about the fire at his house, either. He wondered what books Iain would bring to sell him or ask him to source. A thought occurred to him that he should have warned Iain about the possibility of hexed books floating around. There was no reason for there to be more, but equally no reason why there wouldn’t be more.
The jumble of books in the window hadn’t been touched since he took over the shop and it suddenly hit him that they hadn’t been dusted, either. He moved to the window and began retrieving the books, stacking them on top of the counter.
Once all the books were safely out of the way, he fetched a cloth and a spray bottle of water and white vinegar and cleaned the inside of the window. It highlighted how dirty the outside was, so he filled a basin with water and went out to do the other side, too.
Then he dusted the books on the counter. Halfway through, he decided he would put some different books in the window instead. Mix things up. As he carefully wiped the books and found places to shelve them, he found himself humming quietly. He had the sudden realisation that if he looked into a mirror, he would find his face relaxed. Maybe even smiling.
He paused, his hands stilled, as he waited for the punch of guilt. He should be out looking for Lewis. He was letting his brother down. But the pain was very remote. And he was soon distracted by the task of choosing new titles to go into the window. It was January, a bleak month, but one with beauty too. He knew Esme’s garden was filled with interesting pieces of driftwood, and he wondered if she would let him borrow a piece. He could use it to prop up a few books, so that their covers were better displayed. He sent her a text message and then got back to work.
Esme arrived half an hour later, carrying a large bag. ‘I’ve been thinking about yesterday,’ she announced. ‘That was weird, right? Another death?’
‘Very,’ Luke said. ‘What if both fires were caused by hexed books? And if there are cursed books in circulation, we need to find them before somebody else gets hurt.’
‘That’s not our responsibility,’ Esme said. ‘We need to focus on our community. The island-’
‘It absolutely is.’ Luke hated that he was right. He didn’t want to worry about strangers and cursed books. He wanted to sleep. With the windows wide open so that cold air was playing across his skin the entire time, banishing the memory of the scorching fire. He opened his eyes and looked into the hazel of Esme’s. Sometimes they looked brown, sometimes green, and sometimes, he could see gold in her irises. Right now, they were pale green and worried. ‘What if a kid got hold of one? Or someone old or ill? They wouldn’t survive ten minutes.’ What he didn’t add was that they would be begging for death after five. He rubbed at his aching chest. The claw marks, as he had started to think of them, were five distinct points of pain.
‘It’s not our business,’ Esme said. ‘We belong to the island. Affairs on the mainland are not our concern. My duty is to protect the island and our community. We need to stay safe and to protect this place for future generations.’
Luke waited to check that Esme had finished speaking. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her eyes were bright with what looked worryingly like tears. Esme was no longer the fearful woman he had met a few months ago, but she was still very wary. He wanted to reach out and hold her. To provide comfort instead of the question he knew he had to ask. ‘If not us, then who?’
Rather than answering, Esme bent to unpack two good pieces of driftwood from her bag. ‘I thought these were about the right size, but I’ve loads more if you want to choose your own.’
‘No, these are perfect.’ Luke began arranging them in the window, already imagining them surrounded by books.
She was watching him intently.
‘What?’
‘Hang on.’ Esme was bent over her bag, pulling out other items. ‘I thought these might look good twisted around the driftwood.’
She held out what looked like a coil of copper wire.
‘Lights.’ She held out a hand and he brought one of the pieces of wood back to the counter. She wound the wire around one end and then passed it back.
Luke laid and wound and twisted the wire over the two pieces of wood, hiding the battery pack behind the larger piece, and then switched it on.
‘LEDs, so they stay really cool. They look good inside fishing floats, too.’
They worked companionably for an hour, discussing the placement of books, and not mentioning cursed objects or burned-down shops or lost brothers.
‘You could do with some height,’ Esme said, surveying their efforts with her head tilted to one side. ‘Either stands or something hanging from the top of the windows.’
‘Next time,’ Luke said. ‘I’m going to start simple and work my way up.’
‘Fair enough.’ She smiled. ‘This does look better, though.’
‘It really does,’ he began, and then stopped. Was there a humming sound? He listened intently for a moment. ‘Can you hear that?’
He listened again, with Esme obediently tilting her head and listening, too. Silence.
‘Never mind.’
‘Is it me,’ Esme said, looking around, ‘or did it just get warmer?’
The cool chill of the shop had definitely disappeared. Luke felt pleasantly warm.
‘How is this place heated, anyway? I can’t see any radiators.’
‘I think there’s a warm air system,’ Luke said absently, still half-listening for that elusive humming sound. ‘There are vents at the base of some of the bookcases.’ Then he heard his own words. Maybe the humming had been the heating system coming on. And that was why it had got warmer in the shop. He felt faintly ridiculous.
There were still a couple of books from the old window display on the counter. One was a book of Irish myths and legends with a sage green fabric cover and pretty foil embossed lettering. He picked it up and carried it to the back of the shop where the large mythology section lived. And then he stopped. Where there had been a single unbroken bookcase running along the wall that was shared with the building next door, was now split into two bookcases. Between them was a door that definitely hadn’t been there before.
Luke and Esme stood frozen, staring at the new door.
‘That wasn’t there before, right?’ Luke was the first to speak. Esme looked remarkably calm, but then she was a witch. And she had been on the island for seven years. Maybe after that length of time he would be just as chill. It’s not your first new doorway, he reminded himself. The bookshop had reconfigured itself a few times, and it had taken his measure before revealing the stairs that led to the living space. It was just… still a bit discombobulating. Turned out, it took more than a few months to fully adjust to living in a magical bookshop.
‘Definitely not.’
‘Shall we try it?’
Esme hadn’t moved, but she looked more intrigued than alarmed. It was bolstering. ‘It must open into the building next door. I suppose.’
‘What is next door, anyway? A house?’
‘Nobody lives in it,’ Esme said. ‘We’ve got a few empty properties in the village. I don’t know if anyone looks after them or…’
‘Well, maybe this door opens into it.’ Luke didn’t really believe that. It didn’t explain the magically appearing door, for one thing. And he couldn’t ignore all the other strange things about the bookshop. Not if he wanted to stay sane. The stairs to the upper floor had been not here and then here, back when he had first moved into the shop. He remembered the first night in the place, camping out in the front room. There was no use pretending that this was an ordinary building. He had to accept that things were different on Unholy Island. And he had.
He reached out and brushed the door handle with his fingertips.
‘Are you going to open it?’
Esme was just behind him and he could feel the warmth from her body. ‘Do you think I should?’
‘It’s your shop. You’re the Book Keeper.’
‘Right. Yes.’ He squared his shoulders.
The door was plain wood. Pitch pine with marks and dings as if it had always stood there. The handle was black iron and there was a keyhole. It occurred to Luke that it might be locked. He wondered if this might be the vault or repository that Alvis referred to in her book. He was prevaricating, he knew. What was the phrase? It’s the hope that kills you? He wanted it to be the stockroom. The vault. He wanted a sign that the bookshop wanted him to run the place. That he belonged.
Trying to prepare himself for the disappointment of finding a cleaning cupboard or a blank wall, he grasped the handle and opened the door.
The room was dark and windowless, but a central pendant light illuminated as he stepped inside. There was a table in the middle of the room with a few large books on top and, around the four walls, floor to ceiling shelves. The simple relief was quickly followed by elation. Luke looked around and knew that he was grinning like a lunatic.
‘I think you’ve found your stockroom,’ Esme said. Her voice was a little strained.
‘Are you okay?’ He turned to check on her.
‘Just this place,’ she waved a hand, encompassing the shop and, perhaps, the whole island. ‘It just keeps on surprising me.’
‘I know what you mean.’ He reached out a hand and touched the table, reassuring himself that it was real. ‘Thought you would be used to it by now?’
She laughed, sounding more like herself. ‘Not even close.’
‘Thank you,’ Luke said formally, addressing the shop. He had the urge to wave or do a little bow, but was self-conscious in front of Esme.
‘Thank you,’ Esme said, also looking around as if addressing the building itself. ‘This is wonderful.’
They shared a small smile and Esme drifted over to the nearest shelves and began to look at the books that were neatly arranged. There were blocky black letter labels on the shelves, suggesting that Alvis had kept them arranged alphabetically.
The shelves along the bottom were extra deep and tall and held lidded plastic crates and thick cardboard archive boxes. In one corner there was a wooden shipping crate that looked antique. Underneath the table was a jumble of suitcases, wooden chests, and more plastic boxes. The wall shelving was broken in one place to hold a dark green metal filing cabinet that looked like a relic from the nineteen-forties.
The room was surprisingly dust-free. There was the same scent as the rest of the shop of old paper and wood, along with ink and that distinctive ‘old book’ smell that was particular to bookshops and libraries. There was something else, too. Ozone. The smell of standing on the shore and breathing in the salt-tinged air of the sea.
He looked around, but there was definitely no window. Maybe there were hidden air bricks, letting in the scent of the island. Or, Luke supposed, it was just the way the air inside a magical hidden room smelled.
In addition to the piled books on the table, there was a hefty leather-bound book that must have been A3 in size. It was bound along the short edge and when Luke opened the front page, he found old-fashioned sloping handwriting in fountain pen ink. Flipping through the cream-coloured pages made something obvious. This was a shop ledger from many years ago. Opening it at the back, he found it was full and the last date was nineteen hundred and one.
Esme was crouched in front of the shelving, pulling out an enormous book from the bottom shelf. She paused, the book angled out, and glanced over her shoulder. ‘May I?’
‘Sure,’ Luke said. ‘Help yourself.’
With the large tome levered out from its place, Esme needed somewhere to put it. Luke closed the ledger and moved it over so that she could put the heavy book onto the table.
‘I can’t tell you how I know, but this is exactly what I need.’ She was glowing with happiness and relief.
Leaving Esme to leaf ecstatically through her book, Luke drifted over to the shelving. On the bottom there was a row of Bankers Boxes filled with old paperwork. In the third one he opened, he found a stack of ledgers, each marked with a distinctive crescent moon on the cover. Looking at the most recent, a volume that minutely covered the previous five years in Alvis’s distinctive sloping copperplate, he found purchases and sales for the shop. But not the thrillers and cookery books and romances and book club hits that were fully itemised in the sales ledger that he used daily, the one kept on the counter with the cash register. This ledger listed books like ‘A History of Lycanthropy’ and ‘Edwin Hardcastle’s Diary: The Gentleman Alchemist’. As well as the date of the transaction and the price paid or received, Alvis had added details of the buyer or seller, and some extra notes. ‘Nonsense’ was one succinct summary. Another note was underlined three times. It said: ‘Not For Resale’. The book’s title wasn’t written, just the author, Lyndon Blackwood, and the words ‘volume three’ in brackets.
Luke settled down with his own notebook and combed through the entries, collating a list of repeated names. Jute Books in Dundee was mentioned only once and Alvis had written ‘Fraser is a crook’. The Shambles Book Emporium in York cropped up three times. Campbell & Sons had seven entries. Luke used Google to discover a bookshop by that name in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. He made a note of the address and telephone number. Alvis had bought from this shop on all seven occasions and the notes were mostly positive, except for one that read ‘fake’. He made a mental note to visit. Iain had said the owner was away and that he had been sent to them by an employee. It could be that nothing was wrong, and the owner had just been having a day off, but his gut said otherwise.
There were a couple more regulars, one with copious notes, concluding with ‘overpriced waste of time’ written in red ink. Something occurred to him just as Esme shut the book she had been looking at and joined him. ‘Alvis was writing this for me.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, not me specifically. For whoever came after. All these notes,’ he swept a hand over the book, ‘they’re so that I can continue doing the job.’
Esme’s expression said ‘well, duh’ and he felt like an idiot. He had been told often enough, by Bee and Tobias and Esme herself, that he was the Book Keeper. It was a role on the island. But it felt as if it was only now sinking in what that meant. This was a job that had been done for decades, maybe hundreds of years, in this exact place and in this exact way. Collecting important information and keeping it safe. He caught sight of the book that Esme was clutching to her chest as if it was her firstborn. Keeping it safe for those who need it.
If part of that job now came with danger, he had an obligation to warn others in the profession. They might not be running magical bookshops and not know the true value or importance of the books they found and traded with his shop, but they ought to know if there was a threat circulating.