A Dragon in the Poetry Section

The town crier had a lovely voice. That was the worst part.

He stood on the fountain steps in the middle of Hollybrook market square, unrolled a notice as long as his arm, and read my name like it was good news.

“By order of the Hollybrook Bank, the tenant of Quill & Candle, Number Four, Marrow Lane, being three months behind in her rent, is hereby given thirty days to pay in full or leave the premises.”

“Louder!” someone shouted from the cheese stall.

The crier obliged. He was a helpful man.

I was holding a loaf of bread. I remember that, because I squeezed it flat. The whole square had gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when everyone is pretending not to look at you. I knew every face. The baker. The ribbon girl. Three old men who had borrowed the same book from me for a year and never once bought it.

And in the front row, in his good green coat, stood Linus Pennywhistle.

He wasn’t laughing. That would have been easier. He had his hands folded and a small, sorry smile on his face, the smile of a man watching a plan go exactly the way he’d drawn it.

Our eyes met. He tilted his head. Oh, Marn. Poor thing.

I turned around and walked home with my flat bread. I did not run. I have my pride. Some of it.

Someone whispered poor Odette’s girl behind me, not quietly enough. Hollybrook is a small town. It doesn’t have secrets. It has delays.

Quill & Candle sits on Marrow Lane between a clockmaker and a shop that sells only buttons. It leans a little to the left, as if it’s listening to the neighbors. My aunt Odette always said a bookshop should lean. It means the books are heavy with stories.

The notice was already nailed to my door. The crier’s boy was fast. I yanked it down, went inside and dropped it on the counter.

Then I stood there and let the shop look at me.

I should explain. I can hear books. Not words, exactly. Moods. A cookbook can be smug. A tragedy sulks. An atlas gets restless if it sits too long without being opened. I’ve known it all my life, the way other people know when it’s about to rain.

Tonight, all four thousand of them were holding their breath.

“I’m sorry,” I told the shelves. “I’ll figure something out.”

From the back of the shop came a long, soft sigh. That was Poetry. Poetry always sighs.

Footnote, the shop cat, sat on the notice with his paws tucked under him. He gave me the look of someone who had warned me about this.

“Don’t,” I said.

He yawned.

Above the till, pinned to the wood, hung the only postcard my aunt had ever sent. A gray sea. A gray sky. On the back, in her loopy green ink: Weather lovely. Eat something green. Love, O.

She’d left for a “long holiday” eighteen months ago. I read that postcard every night like it might change.

I made tea and didn’t drink it. I tried to do the sums in my head. Three months of rent. Thirty days. A till that held eleven coins and a button. I’d sold two books that week, and one of them came back.

Under the till sat my account book. I hadn’t opened it in weeks. I’d been not looking at it for two years, and I was very good at it.

I locked the door, climbed the stairs to my little room above the counter and fell into bed in my clothes. I didn’t even take off my shoes.

I woke up because the books screamed.

That’s the only way I can say it. One second I was asleep, and the next every voice in the shop went up at once. Fear. Pure, white fear, like the time a candle fell in the window display, only louder, and from everywhere.

Then I heard the beams.

It sounded like a tree being pulled out of the ground. A long, tearing groan, and then a crack that I felt in my teeth.

I was out of bed before I was awake. The broom I keep by the stairs, for mice and Linus, was in my hands. I don’t remember picking it up.

“Footnote!” I yelled. “Footnote, where are you?”

The world came down.

Dust rolled through the shop like a wave. I coughed, tripped over a crate of unsold almanacs and caught myself on the counter. The books were still shrieking in my head. Somewhere, plaster pattered down like rain.

“Hello?” I said, stupidly. “We’re closed!”

Nobody answered.

I walked to the back of the shop with the broom held up like a sword. My knees were shaking. My aunt’s voice kept saying in my head, Marnie, you never, ever go toward the noise.

Poetry was gone.

The shelves lay flat. The reading nook was buried. Where the roof had been, there was a ragged hole, and through it I could see stars. A few slates slid off and clattered somewhere in the lane.

And in the middle of the wreck, filling the whole back of my shop, was something enormous.

Scales. That’s all I could see at first. Scales the color of cooled embers, dark red going to black, rising and falling slowly like a bellows. A tail curled around the old fireplace. One wing was folded against my rafters, and it was bigger than my bedroom.

A gold eye opened and looked at me.

I knew what it was. Everybody knows. We all had the picture books. Dragons live in the Mountain Court, and the Mountain Court does not come to Hollybrook. Not ever.

I did not scream. I’d like that on record.

The dragon let out a breath, and the whole shop went warm. Then the heat folded in on itself. The wing curled up like a letter being sealed. The scales sank and smoothed, and the shape pulled itself smaller and smaller, until I was looking at a tall young man sitting in the splinters of my Poetry section.

He was wrapped in a velvet curtain. My curtain. The green one from the reading nook.

He had black hair full of plaster dust and shoulders that took up too much of the room, even sitting down. His face was serious and, somehow, a little lost. He looked around slowly. Then he took a deep breath and said, very quietly, as if it were the nicest thing he’d ever noticed:

“It smells like paper in here.”

It was, I realized, the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day.

I hit him with the broom.

It made a loud, flat thwack on his shoulder. He didn’t flinch. He looked at the broom, and then at me, with polite interest.

“That’s once,” he said.

I hit him again.

“Twice.”

“Stop counting!”

“I’m sorry. I like to know where I stand.”

“You’re standing in my Poetry!”

He looked down at the splintered shelf under his bare foot. “Yes,” he said. “I am sorry about that too.”

“Get out of my shop!” My voice cracked halfway through. “You’ve broken my roof. You’ve broken my poetry. I have thirty days. I have thirty days, and you’ve—”

He wasn’t listening.

He had stood up, slowly, holding the curtain closed with one hand, and he was looking past me at the shelves. At the front room, the dusty rows, the stacks I hadn’t been able to sell. Four thousand books, all of them quiet, all of them stunned.

And then I heard it.

A low hum, deep and warm, spreading from shelf to shelf. A purr. The whole shop was purring. The cookbooks, the tragedies, the atlases. Even Poetry, who hadn’t purred in two years, was buzzing under the rubble like a kettle just before the boil.

I had never heard them so happy. They were happy about him.

Traitors, every one.

The stranger turned to me. His eyes caught the starlight and burned a faint, steady gold.

“This,” he said, “is my hoard now.”