Chapter Sixteen
Magician’s Island (or as Antony liked to call it, Old White Man’s Island) was in the middle of Ocean, and on it stood the New Library, a tower constructed of pale limestone, complete with tall black spires and hulking stone gargoyles.
As well as looking like an arch villain’s holiday retreat, it contained the greatest collection of extraordinary literature in all of Britain.
If Lucky couldn’t tell her how to wake up a sleeping fairy and get rid of a thorny wood bent on destruction, then maybe the library could help.
She didn’t love research, but Cliff had drummed it into all of them during their training. It was all very well being able to haul feedbags with one hand, but you had to know your charges first. Before you could even think about giving Issy a belly rub.
The same, Frida assumed, applied to monsters and fairies.
‘Don’t worry,’ Frida said with feigned confidence. ‘All the monsters are asleep.’
In the distance, the white stone library loomed, and she fixed her sights on it, determined not to let Ocean faze her.
Usually, she loved the pounding waves, and found a jaunt across one of the twelve elevated stone causeways that intersecting the habitats like a clock’s face quite pleasant.
But today, it could easily have been LEZ Apocalypse Scenario No.
127, in which Frida and half the keepers get devoured by a rabid kraken in league with Dame Judi Drench, the most salacious of all the seven-tongued poisonous shrimps.
Over the water, Dozy’s canopy felt heavy and as she drove, the unceasing groans and rustles from the heavy branches far above bounced off the dark waves, amplifying the ominous thundering to something truly immense.
Her hands were vice-tight around the steering wheel when Jellybean, trembling, crawled inside her shirt with a squeak of fear.
She could feel his tiny heart pit-pattering against her chest, his electricity simmering at a low-level crackle.
Below them, the underwater tunnels gleamed like luminous sea snakes.
She wondered with a shudder if there were any guests trapped down there.
Sent into oblivion whilst watching the kraken’s aquatic ballet or taking selfies with the yuanapel, floating lazily in their handmade coves of coral and gold.
So beautiful they could make a person weep – before ripping your eyeballs out and using your tears as a lubricant on the way down their throats.
She stroked Jellybean’s fur beneath her shirt for reassurance. At least the wards still hummed within the glass barriers, a soothing lullaby that said all was safe for now.
Just as Grace gave a distressed stutter and Baked Potato, in the back tray, squealed a cracklingly ominous question, ‘Who’s that?’
Cream Pie cheeped, with dour certainty, ‘Bad water.’
And Jellybean poked his heads out of her shirt and pointed with morbid fascination.
Frida watched, horrified, as the languorous shape of a shrimp surged up out of the dark waves to their right.
What was it Antony used to tell them, as they’d taken breaks sitting on the steps of Magician’s Island?
That some sea creatures slept with only half their brains!
Suddenly, she could have kicked herself. Unihemispheric, he’d called it.
Oh god. Could a shrimp kill you with only half their brains?
‘We are not going to get killed by shrimps,’ she proclaimed to Jellybean firmly.
‘No!’ he chirped in cheerful confirmation. ‘Bad shrimps.’
Henry Gladstone, the inventor of the wards, was surely in heaven right now.
She accelerated hard and the shrimp – probably Dame Judi Drench, knowing her luck – flicked her venomous ten-metre-long tongue, eye-sockets bulging as pitch-dark as the Mariana trench.
Those tongues could cause full body boils, shrivelling a person’s skin off in ten minutes flat.
Jellybean pressed his faces against the windshield, his lamp-like eyes wide.
Frida had to resist the urge to grab him and shove him back inside her shirt as a few flying turtles burst out of the water alongside the shrimp, their shells electric blue.
Grace’s wheels squealed as Frida swerved in surprise, and a trayful of storm monkeys shrieked in terror.
Righting the buggy with alacrity, Frida wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of one sleeve as the teacup-sized carnivorous turtles plunged through the waves, half-dreaming perhaps of hapless keepers and their salty, delicious blood.
Frida didn’t think she’d ever been more relieved to reach Magician’s Island.
Shaking all over, she parked Grace alongside Fritz’s Extraordinary Pancake booth, which was at the bottom of the hundred white marble steps that led up to the New Library.
There was no sign of Fritz, and Frida prayed he’d taken the day off, safe at home with his cat Dandelion, whose picture was pinned above the chocolate sauce.
As Ocean spread around them in all directions, full of flying turtles, deadly sea snakes, leviathans, a dreaded Nuckelavee and ballet-dancing kraken – the storm monkeys made a beeline for the pancake mix.
Frida left them to it, taking the steps to the library two at a time.
‘Don’t move!’ she shouted to Jellybean over her shoulder. ‘I won’t be long.’
He gave her a little wave, chocolate sprinkles twinkling rapaciously in his electrified mohawks.
He stuck out both his tongues in the direction of the library, before shoving Oops and Twiglet out of the way in a mad dive to get to the sugar-dusted countertops.
She had to pray it was enough, and that no flying turtle would be feasting on monkey when she got back.
On the drive here, she’d suppressed the fact that she hadn’t been back to this spot since her mum had died.
But now as she raced up the steps, the knowledge hit her, along with the familiar scent of sea salt and cold limestone.
Finally, when she reached the top, she faced the large ebony door and all thoughts of death by flying turtle left her.
She knew she had to hurry for the longer she waited, the more of the LEZ would crumble, the deeper into sleep her friends would fall, and the higher the chance of the habitats failing, bit by bit.
But she and her mum had spent so many hours right here, their backs against the library tower, waiting for the Japanese ‘sea monk’ Umi the umibōzu to make an appearance out of the writhing waves.
With a shaking hand, she touched the door, tracing the familiar shapes of the carved unicorns that embossed the dark ebony. Fighting back the sting of tears, she searched for her mum’s favourite unicorn – the one who seemed to be caught eternally in time between a wild grimace and a laugh.
There she was, as always, in the bottom right corner.
Frida let herself look at that unicorn for one long moment.
Then she blew out her breath and counted to ten, forcing the painful memories back inside.
With a practiced flick, she locked her rosewood box and sent it spiralling into some dark corner of her mind.
She pressed one hand to the ancient door, feeling the hum of the wards lick down her arm.
At the same time, a sudden vice grip clamped around her skull.
She whimpered at the pain but, putting it down to the cruelty of grief, she set her mouth in a stubborn line and forced herself to step inside the New Library.
Just as her left boot came down on something soft and crunchy.
Forgetting about the pain, she leapt back, realising she’d stepped on someone’s hand.
‘Ah shit!’ she cried. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Lana.’
Lana the librarian lay beneath her, wearing her familiar pinstriped suit, unstirring on the plush Persian carpet.
Frida and Lana had dated briefly, but Frida had ended it.
Hamish had been furious, claiming she’d ‘sabotaged her first romantic possibility in years’, and Antony upset because it meant he couldn’t go to the library anymore without being interrogated: Was Frida seeing anyone?
No. Did she like anyone? Not unless you counted a ghost-lynx with rainbow fur or a unicorn with a penchant for ball games.
Do you think Frida would want to go on another date?
Sure, but only if you think you’re a better conversationalist than a grootneck.
Steeling herself, she stepped around Lana, flinching as her muddy boots made footprints across the carpet, the aroma of books and dust settling over her.
She had to admit that she’d missed this place.
She’d spent so much time here as a child, napping in the overstuffed leather armchairs as her mum read at her favourite corner desk.
The LEZ often gave away low-cost tickets to people who couldn’t afford the exorbitant prices, and as a result, this library had basically become her mother’s university.
Time away from the daily drudge of being a waitress, receptionist, bartender and cleaner.
Ada Rose had emigrated from Russia as a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, estranged from her orthodox parents, desperate to give her child a different kind of life.
Maybe it had been that hope she’d found in this library, in books that spoke about a time when real magic had lived in the world, and nobody had been embarrassed to call it that.
Frida ran her fingers over the floor to ceiling bookshelves.
She breathed in the thick scent of the dusty carpets, the ancient magicians’ reading desks, the steady ticking of the ornate grandfather clock.
When she came to the portraits of the seven Beaufort sisters, which lined the eastern wall, she stopped to gaze up at them.
Her mum had always said that Joshua’s sisters had been the true heroes.
While their brother had campaigned in parliament and travelled the world rescuing creatures, these women had been the lynchpins of the early conservation movement, working behind the scenes to raise money.
All the while tending to the wounded animals Sir Joshua brought home to Forge House in the early days.
As an only child with no friends other than her mother and a toothless one-eared feral cat named Bonkers, Frida had always daydreamed about being part of the Beaufort family.
‘Help me,’ she whispered. Hannah, the eldest, looked down at her benevolently.
Renowned for her flower paintings, Hannah held a pink peony in her lap, the Beaufort family’s famous auburn locks curling around her slender white shoulders.
Her steady hazel eyes seemed to glimmer in the warm glow of the lamps, keeping her secrets.
Frida sighed. Georgiana was next, painted in front of the huge serpentine lake in the grounds of Forge House, where the sisters’ seven rescued kelpies – gifts from Sir Joshua – had lived.
Georgina wore a deep copper dress, her red locks stirring artfully in a painterly breeze.
Georgiana was the wildest sister. She’d married three times, each husband richer and more handsome than the last. She’d even gone on a few expeditions, discovering a new species of dragon in Romania with her brother, which they’d named the Great Crested Georgiest.
‘Help me!’ Frida repeated.
But Georgiana, like Hannah, stayed silent.
Dahlia, Charlotte, Eleanor, Arabella. Frida repeated the same plea to each of them.
Finally, she came to Jane. The youngest, the only one with dark hair, collected in a simple coif at the back of her head; her beauty seeming more delicate than the rest. She’d been painted in the sisters’ drawing room, her eyes the pale washed-out blue of forget-me-nots, fixed on some unseen point out of the window.
In a footnote in The History of the Famous Beaufort Family, Wildlife Conservationists and 19th Century Heroes, it mentioned that Jane had spent some time in a ‘private facility’, and the assumption, Frida guessed, was that she’d been a little mad.
But there was no other reference to it, not that Frida could find, and she supposed, as she stood there looking up at Jane, that if Frida herself had lived in the 1800s, she might have been deemed mad too.
Jane was the only one of the sisters who’d never married, and her kelpie had been called Sappho.
Of all the sisters, Jane had been the only one to release her kelpie after they’d moved to Melody.
While Frida loved Georgiana as a figure of great romance, she suspected that it would have been Jane who might have been her friend.
The silence from the portraits however, today of all days, was devastating.
Not that she’d expected them to come alive in their frames, but .
. . Frida wrapped her arms around herself, her headache worsening.
Lana’s nasal breathing and the heavy ticking of the clock indicated that time was moving.
Through the reinforced double-warded floor to ceiling windows she could see the black stretch of the water twinkling.
The stars of spotlights seemed to go on forever.
She could almost forget that out there, her world was hanging on by a thread.
Almost.
She prayed the Jellies weren’t at the bottom of a shrimp’s belly.
With renewed haste, she started scanning the shelves, searching for anything relating to fairy sleep and fairy trees.
It didn’t take long before she’d amassed a promising pile: Forest Fairies Laid Bare; A Mythology of All Things Quickthorn; The Dryads and Drus of Ancient Britain, A Compendium; How to Tame a Tree Fairy in 101 Curious Ways; Infamous Nymphs and their Wicked Deeds Revealed; The Dark and Devious Fairies of the Green Woods of Ye Olde England; Enchanted Sleep Spells for Beginners.
She was feeling almost optimistic as she sank down at one of the desks, the pile of books in a neat, alphabetised stack in front of her and a full mug of Lana’s coffee at her side. And then she began to read.