The Lake and the Library (16 page)

His mouth quivered, pushing back tears. He didn't want me to leave, but he didn't want to force me to stay either. How could I help but want to get away, afraid as I was in his hands, instantly forgetting all the playful and tender ways he had held me before? His grip faltered and he dipped his forehead, pressing it into mine.
Please
,
his hands muttered over my cheeks.
Please don't leave me here
.

I couldn't look at him as I offered him the lie a second time. “I'll come back,” I quavered. “But you have to let me go.”

His fingers ground into my shoulders as he lifted his eyes to me. They were black pearls, unforgiving, as the only word I had ever heard Li speak was snarled into my face: “
No
.”

Something went off, and everything slowed to a mercurial pace. I saw everything unfold piece by piece as it all fell into place, until time caught up with me and crashed against my frail human body in one fell swoop. First, the shelves creaked backwards, smashing into one another like a steady stream of dominoes, upending from one end of the library to the other. Books on the wall shelves poured free of their moorings and fell in a waterfall to the ground, forced out of the wall by geysers of exploding water behind them. It pooled down the walls and cracked the shelves open, floor heaving up to meet the splintered wood. The water was as black as Li's eyes, as unrelenting, and it rose higher with every half tick of my pulse. It took an age to look back at Li as I felt his hands kneading into my flesh, lifting me bodily from the floor and over the banister.

Time pressed itself back together in a guttural
snap
.

“Li—”

He shook his head and did like I asked — he
let me go
.

My heart was a raging powder keg, now. Plummeting towards the floor, the first thought that gripped me was that this couldn't be it. The sense of reason I had abandoned came to my rescue, full tilt —
I had power here once before. Use it.

I winced my eyes shut.

I opened them.

The torrent of birds rushed behind me, and though I only had energy to generate momentary wings, it was enough. They flared wide and pushed, and they were the difference between the life I still wanted and the one that Li thought could make us both happy. I paused before making impact with the floor, and I saw Li leaning over the banister, eyes clear and horrified, whatever had overtaken him having fled now that its work was complete. He reached out for me but betrayal bloomed in my blood. Damage done.

A hurling fist of water leapt out of the wall and dragged me down. It wasn't deep enough yet to submerge me totally, and I sprang from the floor back to the surface. The library lights were guttering and buzzing, one after another exploding under the weight of the water that burst from the wall behind them. The noise was thunderous, and the walls creaked, threatening at any moment to come undone under the pressure. The deer clock tumbled off the wall and sank. The spiral staircases heaved, shuddered, and collapsed in on themselves like Slinkies. I couldn't tell if this was just another one of Li's constructions; either this was his reaction to my leaving, or his final, desperate means of keeping me here. The water was chest deep. I ploughed past piles of books and busted shelves, trying to find my porthole out of here.

A tremor heaved the room, but I persisted to the familiar wall that had always taken me out and in. It was growing too dark and the water too deep to see it, so I dove. I patted the wall, but there was no hole, no inconsistencies, nothing. My exit, like the windows and the outside world, had been blocked off and hidden by Li. This was his last resort.

I resurfaced. “Li!” I screamed over the din of the deluge brewing inside the once-sacred palace. “I can't stay here, you know I can't! Please, just help me
stop this
.”

I couldn't wade anymore, so I swam; swam to the place where the rose window had once been, skirting past and using shelves as push-off points. There was so much debris jutting out of the water, and the darkness was almost entire — something caught my ankle and splashed me forward. I lurched up to catch my breath after swallowing a mouthful of bitter lake water, and I realized Li's medallion was caught on something. In a moment of panic, I yanked my head back, desperate to free myself, and the chain snapped. I scrambled to catch it, but it slipped away.

I looked up to the place where the rose window should have been. The painting of the window that stood in its place was an immaculate deception, another perfect
trompe
l'oeil
, and I glared at it, hoping that the anxious panic I felt could turn it back to glass. Nothing. I couldn't even summon my wings back to buy some time, let alone muster the window. I could make worlds, and here was another one, unravelling around me. I looked and looked and looked for the way out, begged Li to help me, to save me this one last time. But he was gone.

Then I saw the Fable Door, carvings etched in obsidian shadow and the few guttering lights that were defiantly left. I surged towards it, water reaching to my neck now and the floor slipping away from my toes. I kicked and stroked until I was pressing my body against the wood, grasping the handles with everything, yanking and twisting. I dove under, tried to see if there was something I was missing. There was a keyhole, wide and gaping, and I pressed my eye to it. I could see outside, precious, beautiful outside. The dawn was climbing up the collar of Wilson's Woods. I tried the handle again but it snapped free. For an instant, I was more focused on the door itself; underwater, the carvings were alive, surging like frightened minnows and staring at me like I was
their
nightmare. They didn't want this either. They just kept swimming up.

I surfaced, gasping, choking. I slapped my hands furiously against the door. There were no options now. I pressed my face against the wood, pretending that it was Li's chest, that he would wrap his arms around me and lift me out of here. Or just hold me tight until this was all over, and he got what he wanted — me with him, trapped here, forever.

“This place wasn't just yours,” I sobbed into the gushing water, the encroaching darkness, bashing my fists into the wood just to hear something solid. I raised my voice, defiant. “Do you hear me? This was my dream, too! I could make it and unmake it! Without me it fell apart, and you knew that.” My thin voice folded in on itself until it was a pinprick in an ocean of abandon. “But it wasn't my only dream, Li.” I wasn't alone, and when I turned I expected him.

The lady from the river of Shalott stood on the water's surface, ruined flesh hanging off her, white hair tangled in her dead eyes as she looked at me and pointed up.

I turned and gazed at the rose window painting. I shut my eyes. “It wasn't my only dream,” I repeated defiantly. “And you can't have them all.”

The rose painting flashed into glass.

And the undulating torrent that exploded through the panes moaned as it surged upon me, the great tsunami filling the library in an instant, crushing my body against the Fable Door—

—and bursting it wide open, launching me, and an entire lake, out the front door. Books and shelves and the debris of our dreams tumbled after me, the wave soaking and mangling the solid earth as the debris and I met it, face first.

“Ash?”

Everything still swam, still tasted like a mixture of bile and fresh water. Someone was shaking me, and that name, that name that was so perfectly mine, floated on the periphery of my coming back into the world.

“Ash, wake up!”

I jolted and coughed up a lungful of water. The air was bright and clean, and I sucked at it greedily.

A bird flitted by. It was not made of paper.

“Did you sleep here all night? How did you—” It was Tabitha. She looked as though my waking had struck a high-pitched chord of relief behind her eyes.

I touched her face, her hair. “Tabs.” I blinked; Paul was close at hand, the rising sun shaded behind his cropped head. I sat up, still bleary and perplexed. I was on the library's porch, and looming over me was the chained-up and tamed Fable Door. I looked back at Tabitha, my resolve breaking as I collapsed with my head on her chest.

“Oh, Tabs,” I sighed into her shirt. “I had the worst dream.”

I
had only been gone the night, even though it had felt like weeks in the library, and I felt years older. Tabitha and Paul didn't bother asking any questions, and I would have been too spent to field them. They got me home somehow; from there I called the hospital to check on Mum. She was stable but tired, and I could visit her later. Tabs and Paul fed me, and tried to coax me to take a shower, to relax, but I was too unspeakably anxious to be anywhere near water. They installed me on the sofa and opened all of the windows, airing out the empty rooms. It was sunny and silent, and cresting on the horizon was a thunderhead that was purple and pregnant with storm. For now I shied away from the idea of the rain and stared intently at the slanting rays that struck the earth. Things that had gone unseen for these last days were clarifying themselves like an Impressionist painting; soft, details skewed, but they still had form. Still had light. I clung to that, at least, and that I could see faces again, even though I was ashamed to look at them.

Tabitha took my hands and pressed a mug of tea into them. I couldn't look back at her, guilt the only thing left since the briar patch inside me had shrivelled up and snapped apart like weather-worn bracken. For now I couldn't tell which was worse: that I had abandoned everything that was true and real for a momentary dance in a dream, or that I let it consume the heart in me and hurt the people that would have done everything for me had I only asked.

I still saw Li's face above me when I shut my eyes, and it said,
I'm sorry, but
this is the only way
. There was love there, too, warped and cracked as it was. I shuddered.

Tabitha cuffed me under the chin. She smiled, sadly, but she was solid, ready to catch me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I replied, instantly. If I told them, it might break the spell, and a part of me still wanted to find Li, to ease the creases of his soul and assure him this wasn't his fault. But I couldn't keep shutting them out.

Paul sighed, his pale complexion wearing the same weariness that mine did, that Tabitha's did. They were all right there, sharing my grief in their own particular ways. “We tried and tried to call you, Ash,” he said. “But you always seemed so far away. At first we thought it was something we did.”

I curled into the corner of the sofa, trying to make myself small enough to disappear. “I know. I was . . . I
was
far away. And it's my fault. I'm sorry.”

Tabitha sat next to me. “We didn't even know your mom was sick. Why didn't you say anything?”

I didn't know either
. No. I truly think I did know, all along — I just didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see a lot of things. I fretted with my hands, staring deep into them. Tabitha clasped hers over mine.

Tears threatened at the corners of my eyes. I had pushed my friends so hard over the precipice of my own gain, and yet they'd climbed back up when it had broken me. I did not deserve this.

“I'm so sorry, you guys. I'm
so sorry
.”

Paul knelt beside me, placing a Polaroid into my lap. “We . . . looked at the canvas. Sorry, Ash. But after I saw that, I figured that's where you'd been going.”

The photo was a crisp and beautiful take of the library, right from the front. I traced my fingers over the details, trying to press past them and see inside. It had been hidden behind the painting of my defiant princess — I knew that she wouldn't keep my promise, but she had never lied to me.

“I got inside,” I blurted through my tears.

Paul hesitated, looked at Tabitha, looked at me. “Did you — what was in there?”

Li's eyes, his movements. My circus performer, ringmaster, and clown. My own Hook, my Lancelot. My fellow wisher, fellow dreamer. Magician and phantom saviour boy, who could make whimsy out of paper, an aviary out of his breath. In our castle of dreams and promises, stories and paper skies, of water and whispers and a grey woman whose intentions were still unclear to me. We had skipped the light fandango over a boundary between worlds, and we lost ourselves trying to cling to it.

Could I tell them? Could they ever know? I owed them this much.

“I . . . I left my bag there,” I stiffened. “I can show you.”

I slept like I was sick. It wasn't real sleep, just the idea of it. But every time I slipped into even a three-minute, uncomfortable slumber, there he was, in my blood, moving inside me and taking over my bones, trying to pull me back.

I missed him, but I feared him. So I stayed awake. Paul and Tabitha stayed the night with me after I'd come back from the hospital, and, in an effort to emulate the childhood that had been so important to us, we camped out on the living room floor — a protective circle of bodies to ward off whatever still gripped me. Rain
plik
ed against the windows like fingernails, like someone trying to get in. I watched the shapes of the water and the light brace against the ceiling, and fell deeper into a spiral of half-sleep. The hidden room that even Li couldn't see, the drowned woman that showed me the way out of my rabbit hole. The scarred painting and the bubbling wallpaper.

I thrust fully awake in the dark, careful not to wake either of my friends as my pulse beat a war drum in my ears. I glanced at their sleeping bodies — my loyal, unquestioning friends, who were giving more of themselves to me with every shallow breath. I wondered what they were dreaming now, wondered why I'd never asked.

I absently traced a circle on my palm, the palm that had bled but hadn't; touched my mouth that had kissed Li so many times, or dreamed that it had. I didn't know what I wanted anymore. He had tried to pull me under into the folds of our world — his world? — and had hurt me to do it. But I still wanted to see him again, to be a part of it.

Even though he was long gone.

The road to the library today was paved with possibility. I spent the walk thinking of what I would tell Li, steeling myself against what the library had in store once I crossed back into it. I kept everything inside as we dipped down the hill, past the baseball diamond, through the fence and the field of tall grass, through Wilson's Woods, until there we were. Tabitha and Paul watched me, expectant, as I stared up at the untouched rose window, spreading its petals towards the sun as it was choked out by the rain clouds. The window. It was still there. And so was the Fable Door. Nothing had changed. “It's just around the back,” I muttered, leading the way. It had never felt this still before as I approached the porthole and pushed away the debris. The library slouched on its foundations, walls resting paper-thin like an abandoned wasp's nest. It had given up the fight against the earth, had lost all protest, its chained and boarded maw slack with submission. It was deader than I could've imagined. But that didn't haunt me.

Managing through the porthole was not difficult, but gathering the will and courage to do it was. To come back here had taken everything, and without Tabs or Paul it wouldn't have happened. They followed, awed that I had been so ingenious a trespasser, and silent on the topic that I had kept this from them. Finally, we were doing what we had always promised; we went in together. One last adventure.

There were no lights here now, artificial or not. Dim sunlight through the grimy rose window was the only means to show us the truth.

It was empty inside, and cramped, much smaller than the outside had been telling us all these years. But here it was, an absolute void. No shelves, no books, no ladders, no clock. No stories or tomes or an open-handed boy to offer them. Just an endless chasm of good intentions, gutted and hopeless, pigeons fluttering uselessly from their ramshackle roosts as my flashlight passed over them. There was a second level, half-built and collapsed. Part of the roof was caved in where our Terrarium Room should have been. A stringy rat darted into the shadows. Garbage, droppings, animal bones, and beer cans littered the floor.

I felt my blood surging in my ears.
No. It had
been real. I touched it. I felt it. The wood, the walls, the water. It had been right here.
My brain backpedalled on itself, trying to resolve the difference between yesterday and now. The two refused each other like depolarized magnets. I swallowed and tried to calm my shaking hands, pulse quickening. All of it an illusory, empty mirage. Panic. Where was Li? Where could he be hiding when there were no crevices left to keep him? Had he been here at all?

Tabitha and Paul were mystified, but disappointed. They had thought more of this place, too. I had thought so much of it that it had nearly closed me off from the world.

Oh, God.

“Li!” I called, unable to control it, the name a sharp missile that struck the darkness and struck me back.
“Li!”

Paul rounded on me. “Ash, who are you—” But I had taken off, flashing my light in every possible corner until I stumbled and fell. Tabitha chased to my side to help me up but I batted her away, dragging myself to my feet and looking down at what had tripped me: the deer clock, split and ruined on the dirty floor, looked to me with broken countenance. I let my fingers find the edge, content that I had found something from my dreamscape. It
had
been real.

“Please, Li!” I shouted with choked fervour into the dark, my breathing hitched and wanting ferocious. “I'm sorry, Li, I'm sorry! Please come back! Make it all come back!”

I saw something, something fleeing. Was that his shadow taking off, back around to a caved-in corner? I turned and tried to chase it, but Tabitha had her hand wrapped firmly around my forearm. I wanted to rail against both of them, but when I saw their faces I bit back my protest. “There's nothing there,” Tabitha soothed.

I toed the splintered, warped floor. I pictured us lying there, watching the clouds we'd made. The memory bubbled and burst. “He's gone.”

“Who?”

I looked at both of them, and for the first time in weeks, I gave them honesty. “I don't know.” I never had. Not really. And now I certainly wouldn't.

We left the dark place behind, its wreckage and disgrace in my wake of mourning. But just as we were to slip through that little exit again, there it was, tucked in the corner. My bag, sitting on the toppled table that hid the porthole. It was the library's last gift, last means of redeeming itself, and as I reached for it, I saw Li clutching my picnic basket and letting the world cave in around him. He thought I had left him. And this time, he had left me. We had lied to each other. A fair trade.