Chapter Thirty-Four
CHAPTER
Thirty-Four
CASSANDRA CAN’T QUITE shake the wreath of smoke from the bar—something chemical and acrid that lingers even after three showers.
Or the nightmares that have plagued her since.
Talking to Byron has opened up a box she thought she’d closed for good, and night after night she listens to Chiron throw her out of the bookshop.
Sometimes the dream morphs, and then she’s standing in another bookshop, cradling a dying man in her arms. Sometimes he looks like Lowell.
She takes to walking around the bookshop in the small hours of the morning, listening to sleet pepper the windows.
But even the bookshop feels fractious, the books shivering against one another on the shelves.
One day she wakes up and frost rimes the inside of the windows, the shop at least ten degrees colder than outside.
Even Errata can’t seem settle; he meows at shadows, or paces back and forth below the shelves.
On the few occasions her phone gets service, she looks up photographs of sailboats. When there’s no service, she takes out the business card for Sharpe’s, which she still hasn’t thrown away, like a personal taunt.
Lowell calls her twice. She lets the phone ring out.
She tells herself it’s because Edmund told her not to see him again.
Better to let it all cool off, for now, and save herself a lot of trouble—even if there’s a part of her reminding herself that trouble with Lowell is no big hardship.
The press of his body against hers, in the wardrobe. His hands on her forehead, lingering.
After two weeks of not sleeping properly—of barely sleeping at all—she finally loses her patience and makes her way up to Chiron’s tower.
The bookshop must have forgiven her because this time the door is already open, a conciliatory gesture.
She manages to give the armchair a glance, even though her thoughts are swimming with the last moments of her time as a protégé.
There are still fragments of fabric to show that it once was an armchair, but the rest of it is largely verdant green, with sprawling tendrils of white flowers.
Then she turns to the rest of the room.
There are rules that she considered sacrosanct, even when she was still Chiron’s unruly protégé.
Going through his desk was one. Going through his belongings in his rooms was another.
But Chiron had been breaking his own rules all this time, so perhaps they were only sacrosanct when someone else was doing the breaking.
“What were you doing in that shitty bar?” she mutters.
What was he doing amongst people like Roth, people that he claimed to despise? What was he doing, stealing from Lowell Sharpe?
The river is dying, taking the bookshops and their magic with it. And maybe a paradox book could turn back the clock, but Edmund had made it sound as though that’s no longer possible. That Chiron had been working on a solution—here, in his bookshop.
Chiron’s room is slowly being taken over by the greenery, and it takes her a while to dislodge some of the vines creeping over his chest of drawers.
She skims through his clothes—and feels a terrible, lurching pang at the sight of a familiar jumper, or a pair of socks that she’d watched him darn over and over again, so that she no longer knows their original colour.
Then she remembers dream-Chiron, the bite of every word, and she keeps going.
There’s very little of note in his room. Just the day-to-day detritus of a man who had largely lived a life inside his bookshop. At least he’d been honest about that.
She’s ready to head back downstairs when she opens the very bottom drawer, and catches a glimmer of gold, stashed behind a little-worn three-piece suit.
She pulls out the object and examines it, frowning.
It’s a gold mask, wrought in delicate loops and swirls, so that it almost looks as if it’s moving.
Fragments of stars, and what she thinks might be letters, and the suggestion of perhaps another set of eyes, set higher up where the forehead would be.
There’s too much metal for it to be a masquerade mask, enough to cover a considerable amount of the face.
It’s so unlike Chiron to possess something beautiful or frivolous, or unrelated to books, for that matter.
She can’t imagine him ever wearing it. But he had obviously gone some length to protect it.
For a while, she studies it in the light, watching the way the eyes seem to chase her around the room.
The way Chiron’s might have, if he was still here.
Really, searching Chiron’s rooms is a distraction for what Cassandra’s been putting off all week: a trip back to Maud’s bookshop. She pictures herself asking Lowell to come with her, and how much easier the journey would be in his car.
Instead, she wearily begins to pump up the tyres on Chiron’s old bicycle.
The walk up to Maud’s feels twice as long, especially lugging her ledger uphill. Cassandra’s not sure how kindly she’ll take to having her ledger stolen, but perhaps bringing it back will restore enough goodwill for that promised chat.
She’d been waiting for Maud to get in touch after the auction.
But the auction was more than a month ago, and there’s been no word from her.
When Cassandra tried to call the bookshop, the phone rang out, and up to now she’d fervently hoped that it was just a case of unlucky timing.
But after the bar, she’d called again, only to discover that the number was disconnected.
She can’t help but think of Roth and his men, and how eager for violence they’ve been in the interim.
It’s occurred to her that perhaps this silence is bait, of sorts, for a trap that she’s about to walk into.
But Cassandra is tired of playing detective.
Her thoughts ache with the shifting players in this cat-and-mouse game.
Roth, this mysterious society, the unsettling ink vial.
And, at its centre, Chiron, trying to save the river without a paradox book.
She can easily imagine him and Maud writing their list of books on ink, passing it back and forth across the desk.
But that’s where the imagining ends, without any idea of what Chiron had intended to do with this knowledge.
Maud might have known. She’d known he was being hunted, after all.
The thought carries Cassandra—and the heavy ledger—up the forest path, past the rock with Maud’s initials painted across it. Until she reaches the clearing, and her heart stops in her throat.
The bookshop is gone.
Not demolished, not in ruins, not sold off to another retailer or someone else who would have use for a magical cottage in a forest. Just… gone, as though it never existed at all.
She would think she was in the wrong place.
But there’s the unkempt garden, now wilting and brown in the frostbitten weather.
Only the mint has survived, running wild across the front.
And if she looks very closely, she can just about see the outline of where the bookshop might have stood, the faintest of imprints left in the soil.
What happens to the fucking past? Edmund had snarled at her. Without the river, the bookshop has unwound itself entirely, like thread frayed to nothing. A terrible pang of warning fizzles through her.
She reaches to call Lowell, before she remembers that she’s not supposed to be speaking to him. Instead, she tucks the thought back in the carefully constructed box for all such thoughts about Lowell Sharpe. A fine drizzle starts up, and she slides the ledger into its waterproof bag.
She walks around the perimeter, trying to commit it all to memory.
She turns over rocks with the toes of her shoes, just in case Maud left any clues behind.
She listens for the sound of the river, or the echo of books, or even just the creak of floorboards underfoot, to prove that the bookshop wasn’t some figment of collective imagination.
But all she can hear is the rain and the forest around her, and all she can feel under her feet is wet grass.
Come the summer, it’ll all merge with the wild, and no one will ever know that a bookshop was here, once. Maybe, in this lifetime, it never existed.
She makes the long walk back down to her bicycle, a sense of dark foreboding haunting her footsteps.
Cassandra returns to the bookshop, turning her questions over in her mind.
Every time she thinks she has a grasp on the puzzle, it all slides away from her.
Maud was her last big lead; without her, there’s only the tenuous thread of ink.
The quiet thrum of alarm in the pit of her stomach grows louder.
She asks Byron to make a couple of discreet inquiries about Maud. Nothing. Not even a rumour suggesting to where she might have vanished.
Sleep, already a challenge, becomes impossible. It’s impossible to concentrate on the customers who filter in and out of the bookshop, impossible to set her mind to its never-ending upkeep. She spooks at shadows; she ignores another two calls from Lowell.
And, like a compass always attuned to north, she thinks about the paradox books.
She’s still considering them when she goes down to the bookshop below at midnight, clutching several books in need of repair beyond her able fingers.
The walls shimmer with waxy light, and she fights the nausea she still can’t quite overcome.
Too many possibilities, crammed into a space that, like the candlelight, is neither here nor there.
If Cassandra thinks too purposefully about the hallway—what colour she’d assume for the walls, whether underfoot is carpet or wood or tile—the bookshop below shifts to accommodate her wishes.