Chapter 5 The Sleeping Cellar

The cellar was the one part of Quill & Candle I never had to worry about.

It slept.

That’s how my aunt put it. “The Sleepers,” she called them. Two thousand old books, packed down there in the dark since before I was born. Nobody opened them. Nobody read them. And books that aren’t read go quiet, then cold, and then they just stop. They don’t die. They go dormant, like seeds, waiting for somebody to come along and ask.

The last time I’d gone down there, a year ago, they’d been like stones with words on.

Now the floor was humming under my hand.

“Idris,” I said. “Wake up.”

He was awake before I finished. One moment he was a dragon asleep on my floor, the next he was sitting upright with a hand on my arm and his eyes bright gold.

“What is it?”

“Listen.”

He did. I watched him hear it. His head tipped, and his face went from alarmed to puzzled to something very close to guilty.

“Ah,” he said.

“What do you mean, ah?”

“I may have—” He stopped. “That is possibly me.”

“Possibly you?”

“I run warm.” He looked down at the floorboards, which, I now noticed, were toasty under my palm. “It leaks. I am sorry. I did not know about the cellar.”

“You woke up two thousand books.”

“By accident.”

“By sleeping.”

“I do not think,” he said carefully, “that this is a point in my favor.”

The cellar door stuck. It always had. I had to put my shoulder against it, and then it gave all at once, and I stumbled onto the top step.

The noise hit me like a wall.

Who’s that? Is that a reader? Is it morning? It’s warm! Why is it warm? Did someone open us? Are we saved? Is it a reader, is it a reader, is it a reader—

I put my hands over my ears. It didn’t help. It never helps. They aren’t in my ears. They’re in my head, a voice for every book, and I had never heard more than ten at once in my whole life.

Two thousand.

I sat down hard on the stairs. My knees folded and I just sat, hands over my ears, eyes squeezed shut, breathing in short little gulps.

Reader. Reader. Reader. Read me. Read me first. No, me. She can hear us. She CAN HEAR US—

“Stop,” I whispered. “Please. One at a time. Please.”

They didn’t stop. They were too happy, too loud, too long asleep. They poured over me like water.

A step creaked behind me.

Idris didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t say a word. He came down two stairs, past me, looked into the dark of the cellar, and growled.

I’d expected it to be frightening. It wasn’t. It was low, and long, and warm, a sound like a cat who is also a mountain. It rolled down the stairs and across the floor and into every corner of that cold, crowded room.

And underneath it, very softly, he said, “Enough. Quiet now. She cannot hear herself.”

The noise stopped.

Not all at once. First the loud ones, the shouters on the near shelves. Then the whispers behind them. Then, one by one, the rest, falling silent like toddlers who’ve been told the story is about to start.

I lowered my hands.

It was quiet. Truly quiet. There was only a murmur now, a soft, shy rustle, like a thousand pages turning over in their sleep.

“Did you just shush two thousand books?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How?”

He shrugged one shoulder, still looking into the dark. “I grew up in a very crowded cave.”

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. It came up out of my chest in a helpless, shaky wheeze, and then I was laughing so hard my eyes watered, and I had to put my forehead on my knees.

When I looked up, he was watching me.

His face was perfectly serious. His eyes were not.

“That is good,” he said. “The laughing.”

“It’s the nerves.”

“I do not mind,” he said. He seemed surprised to mean it.

“Will they do that every night?” I asked. “Wake up like this?”

“Only if I stay warm.” He looked at the floor. “I could sleep somewhere else.”

“No.” It came out too fast. “They’d miss you.”

“The books would.”

“Yes,” I said. “The books would.”

We went down together, with a candle between us.

The cellar went on and on. Low arches, damp stone, and shelves from floor to ceiling, packed with books I had never read. Leather and cloth and cracked gold. Some of them were so old that the titles had worn clean off.

And they were awake.

I could feel it. Every one of them, soft and hopeful and quiet, the way people are quiet when they’ve been told to behave and are trying their very best. A big family atlas shifted as we passed. A book of sermons gave a small, dignified cough.

“They want readers,” I said slowly. “That’s all. They’re not loud because they’re rude. They’re loud because they’re hungry.”

“For what?”

“For somebody to open them.” I laid a hand on the nearest spine. It was warm. It had never been warm. All along the shelf, the others leaned toward the candle, toward Idris, like flowers toward a window. “They’ve been asleep for years, Idris. They thought nobody was ever coming.”

He said nothing. He stood very close behind my shoulder, and I could feel the heat of him through the back of my shirt. He looked at the shelves, and the shelves looked back.

“I know a little,” he said finally, “about waiting for somebody to open you.”

I turned around. He wasn’t looking at me.

He was looking at the floor.

I didn’t know what to say. So I did what I always do when I’m out of words. I turned back to the books.

That’s when I heard it.

Not a shout. Not a murmur. Just one small voice, from the lowest shelf by the stairs, very clear and very patient.

Marnie. Here. Marnie.

I crouched.

It was a thin little book with a green cloth cover. The corners were curled, and the spine was cracked in three places, the way a book gets when a child has loved it. Gold letters, nearly worn away: The Hatchling’s Primer.

It was warm in my hands, and purring.

“What is it?” Idris asked.

“It’s for you,” I said, and I wasn’t sure how I knew. “It’s been waiting for you.”

“For me?” His voice cracked. “How can a book know me?”

“I don’t know. But it called for me like it’s been waiting for someone to bring you.”

I opened the cover. The paper smelled of lavender. Inside, in loopy green ink I had seen on a postcard every night for eighteen months, were four lines in my aunt’s handwriting.

For the dragon.

Be patient.

He’s only afraid of one word.

I read it twice. My hands had started to shake.

Above me, at the top of the cellar stairs, Idris stood with the candle in his hand, pretending not to look at the book. He had no idea what it said. He couldn’t read it.

I looked up at him.

Aunt Odette had known.

She had known about him all along. She had known a dragon was coming to my shop, and she had left me a book to give him, and then she had gone on holiday and never said a word.

And what, in the name of every book in this room, was the word he was afraid of?