The Lake and the Library Read Online Free PDF

would be. I knew it. This would be our last great adventure. They would see that I still cared, was still here for them, one more time before they made more plans without me.
    But right now, this moment was mine. And so was whatever else that met me on the other side of that hole. After tucking the crowbar safely inside, I shoved my bag through the hole before getting down on my belly and starting to crawl in.
    My hands made it in first, and feeling only empty air as I waved them around, I cleared my head through the hole, then my shoulders, and everything else followed through. I wriggled hard and, after a few seconds of panic at being stuck, and telling myself to
breathe
,
I was in.
    Still on my stomach, I groped around and found my bag, and as I ransacked it, blindly searching for my flashlight, I couldn’t keep my mind off the all-consuming silence. The noise of the horrible storm seemed like it had been absorbed by an ancient sound barrier, and my thick panting sounded like a roar in my ears.
    I smacked the flashlight head, wishing I’d bothered to change the batteries before I left home today. It flickered, but wouldn’t light. I struggled to my feet, knees quaking from the cold, until I stumbled out into the open, wheeling forwards and expecting to land flat on my face again. Instead, my hands met something square, ribbed, and wooden. My fingertips danced and touched and tried to read what I felt in the darkness, but sudden lightning served my need, instead. There they were: shelves, bindings . . .
books.
    I fumbled with the flashlight, smacking it so hard the pain sang in my hand. I was desperate. Like a spooked horse, it sprang into action, and my small halo of yellow light revealed the unbelievable truth. In front of me were books, mountains of them, of every size and shape I could imagine, caked in dust. The shelves went on for dark miles, and emboldened by how all of this
had
to be a dream, I wandered into the centre of the massive room I’d wriggled in to, finding myself face to face with the huge rose window — the window that, in a dream flash, had been a giant, winking eye. Rain pelted it from the other side, where the real world ended and this one began. I stepped reverently into the dim, rose-shaped light the window cast onto the floor, and I realized what this place was. After sixteen years of dreaming, after a decade of enduring Treade and its deprivation of my soul . . . I had fallen down the rabbit hole and landed in a library.

I swallowed hard and turned around in a slow, full circle, shining my flashlight out to scatter the shadows. Dust and cobwebs dominated the stagnant kingdom, a landscape that seemed to stretch impossibly; on the outside, it hadn’t looked this big. And the
books
— it didn’t seem like they had an end or a beginning, a head or a tail, and I wasn’t about to find either and spoil the magic. The very walls were shelves, with balconies above, bigger case units below, and ladders to climb or slide along the shelves to my heart’s desire. There were even untouched, austerely upholstered chairs tucked into reading desks, a place where spectres confessed dark deeds and ghosts cleaved to their books on philosophy, making little use of the green teller lamps covered in capes of cobwebs in front of them. I saw all of these shadows with a new clarity, and so much more than that. Because the more and more I saw, the more this defiant feeling germinated in my small chest: this was
my
place. And with this jewelled key to Treade’s defiance in my hand, I could lock it all behind me and leave triumphant. The secret was mine at last.
    But it was still a mystery, no matter how haughty I was. Ever since Paul got his first library card, he had tried to dig up any town records, photos, files, anything concrete to find out who the building belonged to (even before we felt it belonged to us). But all we had was poorly constructed hearsay, since the