Chapter Three
CHAPTER
Three
CHIRON’S BOOKSHOP IS empty.
Cassandra peers around the corner, waiting for someone to materialise.
The inside is black, suffused with a thick, uneasy quiet.
When she takes another step forward, it’s more of a leap to avoid the enormous stack of post gathered at the foot of the door.
The back of her neck prickles with the sense that someone is watching her.
“Hello?” she says.
A sound like distant thunder judders the floorboards.
She flinches, ready to run—but it’s only the bookshop flexing its muscles as it rouses from slumber. One by one, the lamps flicker on, sputtering dim orange light. The shadows dissolve into softer creatures as the room coalesces in front of her.
For years, she’s wondered what became of the bookshop. What new shores it had landed on, captained by its owner. Whether Chiron ever thought of her at all.
And now she’s here, she can barely drink it all in.
Most of the bookshop is just the way she remembers it, at least in terms of layout.
An enormous cedar desk sits like a throne in the centre of the shop, armed with an expectant brass bell and bracketed by shelves that used to brim with books.
Above, a chandelier twinkles with the remains of its crystal teardrops, cobwebs dancing in the gaps.
Behind it, an elaborately carved stairwell twines upwards and below, with a moth-eaten carpet runner held in place by rusting ornamental rods.
And there’s the sound of the river, its current rushing underneath the shop. The black hole that so attracts the bookshops to this particular street, enigmatic in its machinations. The precise quality that makes this bookshop… other.
Always, the river.
The rest of the bookshop is lit in a warm orangey glow, illuminating rows upon rows of books grey with dust, dead plant pots and other detritus.
It wasn’t so long ago that it was Cassandra’s job to water the plants and clean the shelves, and if she squints, she can almost see the ghost of her younger self ducking between a handful of irritated booksellers.
As far as entryways go, it’s pretty magnificent, and Cassandra would think she’s still dreaming, were it not for the state of the shop.
She takes a deep breath, and inhales a musty, lonesome smell.
Then she swipes her finger across the cedar desk and grimaces.
The shop was always shabby, but Chiron would surely never have let it get this bad. Unless—
She sits down at the desk, the leather chair creaking under her weight. Runs her hands along its polished edge, gathering dust under her fingertips, until she finds an engraving: O to you, who holds our fate most tight, we are but story made manifest.
Chiron had told her that a magician-turned-bookseller had written that on the desk, that he was imparting a hidden phrase.
And when Cassandra was still young enough to believe him, she’d passed other bookshops and wondered if they, too, knew this secret, whispered from bookseller to bookseller like sacred text.
Now, of course, she knows it’s just a line from an obscure poem. Not magic, or sacrosanct.
She gets up and brushes herself down. “Chiron?”
The bookshop is silent, save for the sound of dust humming against electric lamps. Reflexively, she glances to the oddly unadorned wall next to the staircase—odd because in a bookshop, no space can ever afford to be wasted.
But it isn’t wasted space. Not really. Because—
Upstairs, something thunks against the floor, and her heart pistons in her chest.
“Chiron? It’s me. Cassandra.”
He must be able to hear her—he’s always had an uncanny knack for sensing customers—but there’s still nothing. No weary footsteps, not even the first angry stirrings that his exile has returned without permission.
Cassandra glances at the winding staircase, then at the closed front door. Quickly, before she can change her mind, she heads upstairs.
She navigates through a series of narrow corridors, made narrower by the stacks of books, empty boxes and other detritus that line the floor.
Remnants of moonlight filter through scum-frosted skylights, putting her in mind of an aquarium, shadows oscillating on the walls.
She flicks the light switch, but electricity has always been erratic in the deeper corners of the shop, and the lamps remain stubbornly unlit.
Yet even without good light to see by, it’s not difficult to spot the marks on the peeling wallpaper, water damage creeping from somewhere within the wall, along with the unmistakable whiff of mildew. A book’s worst enemy, after fire.
Something has happened, a terrible voice whispers in the back of her mind.
Ignoring it, she presses upwards, to the second floor. But her hands find themselves pulling out the letter, clutching it in her fist. She doesn’t open it, though. It could say anything.
Remember me? Anyway, fuck you again and I’m going on holiday for a bit so don’t try to visit ha ha, and did I mention fuck you?
She steps underneath a crooked archway into the reading room, and once again, she’s struck by that dizzying sense of travelling through time. As though she’s walked straight through a photograph into her childhood.
The reading room is enormous, with a high vaulted ceiling and large arched windows that look out onto the courtyard in the centre of the bookshop.
Beautiful iron lanterns in fantastical curlicue designs hang from the ceiling at different heights; when lit, they give the impression of stars twinkling above, though now only a few flicker glumly at her.
Then there’s the hearth, empty ashes in the grate, and a mosaic-tiled kitchen countertop, chipped and grimy.
It’s bursting with objects: books, colourful tins of varying sizes, unidentifiable foodstuffs, reams of paper with semi-illegible notes, an inexplicable stack of horseshoes.
“Chiron?” she says uncertainly.
The room is tombstone silent.
There are dozens of other rooms, presumably in similar states of disrepair, but Chiron would have heard her from them, and come to investigate. He should have heard her by now.
With nothing else for it, Cassandra climbs the winding spiral staircase to the tower, with empty brackets where candles used to sit.
If Chiron’s not here, then she can wash her hands of the mystery, she decides.
She doesn’t owe him this. But she owes, well, something to the bookshop.
And if curiosity is what got her thrown out in the first place, then the same curiosity has brought her back.
At the top of the staircase, Cassandra pauses to catch her breath.
The tower is higher than she remembers, even though she would have surely struggled as a child to climb all the way up here.
Then again, that’s the nature of the bookshop: pliable as a dream, with that same stomach-lurching feeling whenever a new corridor opened up, or a room vanished after months, or even years of regular use.
There is still a slightly cursed first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, v.ii C–L that a previous owner had gone to great lengths to obtain, only for it to vanish along with the lower reading room, periodically reappearing every seventy or so years.
At the top of the stairs, there’s just one door, made of thick oak held in place by a rough frame, and a small brass plaque next to it, as if the owner’s rooms need introduction. The air is still, a held breath.
Chiron won’t be here, she thinks. And then this will be just another painful excursion into the life she no longer has. Another chance to brush her fingers against all that might have been.
She doesn’t let herself think about what might happen if Chiron is here.
She considers knocking on the door, then thinks better of it, and pushes it open. It’s heavier than she remembers, and she’s treated to a full view of the entryway to Chiron’s apartments.
Ordinarily, Cassandra would be struck by the glass-paned ceiling, with moonlight pouring through it, or the teetering piles of books that threaten to engulf the room.
A room she’d once treated with reverent awe because to step in here was to be in the presence of a god, and all the gods that came before.
It had certainly felt that way when she was young, before she understood that they were just as human as she, and therefore just as flawed.
Her gaze instantly goes to the space where Chiron’s favourite armchair sits. Or, rather, where it used to be.
In its place, a growth of delicate white flowers has sprung up, swallowing upholstery, though each one is no bigger than a fingernail.
Their tendrils cast a viridian tint on the walls, and the smell is sweet yet inexplicably sad.
Green shoots unfurl upwards, prising apart the floorboards beneath it, as vines wind around the claw-foot legs.
From this angle, in this light, the shape is of a man asleep in his armchair. And there, nestled in the grass at his feet, is the key to the bookshop.
Cassandra grasps the edge of the doorway for support. Her legs are suddenly weightless, insubstantial things. Her vision swims.
Chiron is the owner. Has always been the owner.
Was.
This is why Cassandra was able to walk through unimpeded. This explains the neglect, the rot, the aura of sadness pervading every corner.
The bookshop has no owner. It must always have an owner.
And even though Cassandra was deemed unfit years ago, even though she swore she would never step foot in here again. Even though she has set the bookshop aside in every way imaginable—
It’s found her again.
A smudged, water-stained letter, the edges furred with damp. The envelope is addressed to Cassandra F—; the rest is almost entirely illegible.
Cassandra,
It has taken some time for me to compose this missive, but at last I have managed it. I won’t trouble you with the reasons behind this decision; only a reminder that you are still a protégé of this house, and so whatever happens next is of your own making.
The bookshop is yours. I give it to you freely. Please look after it, and it will look after you.
I wish you well, Cassandra, as always.
Yours,
Chiron