The Lake and the Library Read Online Free PDF Page B

meticulously kept Treade archives had been burnt down forty years back at the hand of the archivist’s scorned lover (quite the scandal). So no matter who we asked or how we persisted, we were waved off, shooed away, told to “mind our own business,”
and some, who were as ancient as the town and too slow to trust, said the place was cursed. That those who had owned it, who had built it, had never even been inside. “Rich folks and their secrets,”
they said. It was the breeding ground of endings.
    Now inside, seeing with my own excited eyes what the walls had concealed all these years, the mystery didn’t deepen — it dissipated. All bets were off. We had to start from ground zero, and all of a sudden I could picture the place lit up and alive, imagining that a long time ago there were people who loved this place, who were happy here.
    The possibility flickered away in harmony with my flashlight. I smacked it against my palm and moved out of the rose outline, wondering how an entire town could totally ignore this book palace, and realizing that whoever claimed to have sneaked in here had to be lying; no one could have kept this quiet all these years. And the books . . . I trailed my hand from shelf to shelf, the gold foil stamping glittering when I wiped the grime away, the leather spines buttery and supple, too. I felt as though I was the first person to ever touch them, that each time my fingertips brushed across a book that it came to life, shivering to the depths of its saddle-stitching. I felt like I was on a mission to salvage every dreaming heart who stood outside of this building, or in Treade at all, who dreamed of something more.
    After giving it another shake, my flashlight lingered dimly over a nearby ladder that soared up a free-standing bookcase. I think everyone who has ever felt that books provide sanctuary has dreamed of sliding on those kinds of ladders, little library birds darting from flower to flower for the hidden nectar at their hands. And I was no exception. Tucking the flashlight in the waistband of my jeans, I gingerly tested the rungs for splinters or faults, but my footing was sure despite my soggy shoes. About two rungs up, I reached out and snagged randomly, coming away with a gold-stamped cover revealing that Percy Bysshe Shelley was here, alive and well. “Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.”
Up higher were more of his contemporaries, along with the reams of the poetry I always loved and tried to share, but they were few and far between who could dive into the lines like I could, and swim in pentameter like a wave. Even past the mud caked in my eyebrows or the damp clinging to my clammy skin, I felt like I was being embraced by long-lost family, like I was coming home, and all my years of loving literature and being called out as a
nerd
or a
dork
were wiped away. They gave me strength instead, pulsing their verses into me like currents. So I kept climbing. Hemens, Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson beckoning to my occupied hands — one clutching the wooden bars, the other browsing. I gingerly wrested each book free, gave my noiseless respect, and shelved it again. And I climbed.
    Suddenly, I had come to the very top of the shelf, and the end of the ladder. I chanced a look at the ground beneath me, only once, and I got the instant boomerang feeling of having come too high, too fast. I held on tighter and reassured my drenched feet that I was nimble and safe, and I was just fine where I was. Nothing could hurt me up here. I took my light out of my waistband, shining it around to see if I could find anything else brilliant before I started my descent, and something winked at me from across the top of the shelf. It was bound in bright silver, and it seemed like it had been discarded or simply forgotten where it lay, under a landing and just out of reach. I only wanted to see the title, feel the book’s weight in my