The Windvale Sprites (5 page)

There was no decoration on the chest save for two tiny letters stamped into one of the metal plates. Mrs Fields leaned in to take a look.

‘B.T.,’ she read.

‘British Telecom?’ said someone stupid.

‘No – Benjamin Tooth!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s the lost works of Benjamin Tooth!’

* * *

All morning people buzzed around the trunk and poked things into the keyhole until Mr Trap turned up and cordoned it off with the large-print tape.

It was arranged that a locksmith would come at lunchtime to open the chest and, with him, a photographer from the local paper to record the event. Mr Trap was in his element running around making phone calls and notifying people of what he started referring to as ‘my discovery’. Asa suspected he was going to try and get in the photo come lunchtime.

By one o’clock word had spread enough that a small group of twenty or so people had gathered in the library atrium to see the chest opened. The photographer took a few shots of the trunk with the broken-open pedestal and then the locksmith knelt down beside it and set to work with a selection of thin, pokey tools. Everyone held their breath. Eventually they all had to let that breath go and take another one, which they held. But it soon became apparent that this might take some time and before long everyone was breathing normally again.

The locksmith’s ears and cheeks started to go red as he worked under pressure. He shook his head and tutted. Trap leaned in with a furrowed brow as if he might be able to spot the problem.

The photographer lowered his camera and said, ‘Can’t you do it?’

It’s what everyone was thinking but it didn’t go down well with the locksmith, who snapped, ‘I need to concentrate, and you’re standing in the light!’

The photographer wasn’t standing in the light, he was nowhere near, but he took a step back anyway and adjusted his focus.

Ten minutes later and the small crowd were starting to drift away when Mr Trap, who had been to answer the telephone, burst back into the atrium and held up his hands triumphantly.

 

‘Hold everything!’ he announced, which seemed odd, as nothing had happened for ages.

He paused dramatically and continued, ‘I have just got off the phone to the BBC,’ another good pause for reaction, ‘who asked me if they can send a television crew, here, to the library, and film the opening of the chest live on tomorrow’s breakfast news!’ With that he looked as if he wanted to take a bow but instead just took a dainty step back and awaited the applause he so obviously thought he deserved. The applause was not forthcoming and as people started to leave he called after them, ‘Tell all your friends! Let’s get a good crowd here tomorrow, shall we?’

Nobody answered but the locksmith remarked, ‘I don’t know how you’re going to get this open on live TV, I can’t shift it.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Trap, ‘I know a man with bolt cutters.’

*

Asa had to think of a plan quickly. He had a day to get into the trunk, but when would he ever get time alone? Only after the library was closed and the building was locked. The only way would be to hide somewhere in the library and spend the night there. There was still enough of lunchtime left to speedily cycle home and grab some provisions. A torch and spare batteries, some sandwiches and a bottle of water. It’s never good to lie to your parents except perhaps when you are on the brink of an earth-shattering discovery so Asa left a note to say he was spending the night at his friend Chris’s house and he wrote down the telephone number. This was a confidence trick as his mum already had the number but if it was written down for her she would be less likely to check. Asa would just have to hope she didn’t.

The first part of the afternoon was spent looking for a likely hiding place until Asa suddenly realised that both the outer doors and the inner doors to the reading room would be locked. This meant he would have to actually be hiding in the atrium when the building was locked. The atrium, of course, was completely bare apart from the locked trunk and the empty pedestal that used to cover it. The pedestal! It was easily big enough to get inside and if he pulled it flat against the wall once he was in it would be impossible to know he was there.

The rest of the afternoon dragged painfully slowly and Asa kept drifting into the atrium to look at the trunk and the box, wanting to get in to try it for size. When five o’clock eventually came around and everyone had left, Asa got his bag from behind the counter and bid Mr Trap goodbye as nonchalantly as he could manage. Then he walked into the atrium and with a glance behind him ducked down into the wooden pedestal. Once inside he got hold of the edge and tugged the box against the wall and there he sat, hardly daring to move, waiting for the librarian to leave.

There was space inside the box but not enough to stretch out fully and it soon started to become uncomfortable. When finally, after half an hour, Mr Trap left for home, he locked the doors behind him without noticing a thing.

Once he had gone Asa pushed the box with his shoulder until there was a large enough gap for his feet to stick out and he could lie down flat. He stayed that way, in the box with his bag as a pillow, and listened to the footsteps of people outside walking back from work until, eventually, he drifted off to sleep.

It was dark outside when he was awoken by voices coming up the library steps. It took a few seconds to remember where he was but when he did he pulled his feet sharply back inside the box and listened. It was the group of teenagers who usually hung out by the clock tower. They reached the door and peered in at the trunk but Asa could not make out what they were saying. At one point they rattled the locked doors and he thought they might break in but after another ten minutes they got bored and moved off.

Asa waited until all was quiet outside and then heaved the box away from the wall.

Slowly and painfully he inched his way out. It felt so good to be free that he just lay on his back on the marble floor for a few minutes looking up at the ceiling. It was dark in the library but the orange glow from the street lamps outside threw just enough light to see by.

Asa pulled himself up on to his knees. His instinct was to keep low in case anyone passing saw a shadowy figure in the library and called the police. When there were no cars it was insanely quiet but the echoey entrance hall amplified any noises that Asa made. His nerves were fraught as he approached the trunk that was sitting solidly where it had been left two centuries before. Taking the silver key from his pocket he pushed it into the padlock and turned it once. But rather than the clunk of a latch opening, it made the ratchet sound of a clock being wound. A mechanical click sounded from somewhere inside the lid of the trunk and then a low whirring began. Asa waited, the whirring faded and then stopped. Silence. He tried to lift the lid but it still wouldn’t budge. He took the key again, thought, here goes, and began to wind. Immediately he could hear things starting to happen inside and after ten or twelve turns the key would turn no further. Deep within the box musical notes began to faintly chime a ghostly tune and a shiver ran up Asa’s spine. The tune came to an end and as the last chord hung in the air there was a dull clunk-click; the trunk seemed to sigh, like someone loosening their belt after a big dinner, and the lid slowly raised a couple of inches.

In the streetlight’s glare he could see that the sheer volume of papers in the trunk had pushed the lid up when the lock was released and a few loose leaves slipped silently to the floor. The smell of the paper was almost overwhelming. The same dust-and-old-paper smell that you’ll find in any library but so concentrated he could almost taste it. If you squeezed the chest you could probably extract pure essential oil-of-library.

There was not enough light to read by so Asa took out the torch he had brought and turned it on. Suddenly the entrance was flooded with light and he hurriedly clapped a hand over the beam. He sat in silence for a while and raised his head enough to peak out of the window. The street outside was deserted and so, allowing just a sliver of light to escape between his fingers, he tentatively examined a page.

The handwriting was spidery, scratched into the paper in a manic frenzy with blots and splatters around every word like a cloud of gnats. Asa studied it closely but couldn’t make out a single word. It wasn’t that it was illegible but it seemed to be written in a different alphabet. He spent a few minutes trying to decipher the scribbles before noticing that most of the sentences started with a full stop. It was written backwards! He looked around for a reflective surface but the only thing was the window out on to the street. He ducked down low and crawled over to the double doors. Then, squatting awkwardly, he tried raising himself just enough to see the reflection of the page in the window but this didn’t work as it was too dark. After a few further experiments Asa found if he shone the torchlight through the paper from underneath he could just make out the backwards writing. Try as he might he could not stop wild shadows dancing on the walls whenever he moved the torch and so, with an armful of papers and ledgers to sift through, he crawled back into the wooden pedestal, where the light would be hidden, and set to work.

Most of the pages were written on both sides, which made it confusing as he skimmed through the documents for anything of interest.

The pages seemed to be in no particular order, starting halfway through a sentence with no headings or titles, and the writings just appeared to be the ramblings of a madman:

For the next few hours Asa sat inside the wooden pedestal shining the torch through the pages and searching for some sort of lead. When he had gone through a pile he would emerge, lie on his back, stretch his limbs, and then get a new pile of documents to go through.

The pages at the top of the trunk seemed to have been thrown in as an afterthought and the further he dug down the more ordered the documents became with projects bound into ledgers, dated journals and some printed material that was written the right way around. There were also lots of maps, graphs and diagrams, detailed watercolours of plants and animals. Asa felt he was close, but could still spot nothing relating specifically to the fairies.

The town clock chimed every hour but nonetheless Asa had lost all track of time. Did I just hear the clock? Was that three or four o’clock? Did I fall asleep? The spidery writing was becoming harder and harder to focus on and his head began to pound.

Reaching the end of a particularly big stack of papers he was shocked to count seven chimes of the town clock and he peeked out of his box to see the sky outside beginning to lighten. He had an hour, hour and a half at most, before Mr Trap came to open up. There was one more hefty armful to go through and as there was now more light he spread the sheets out on the marble floor. He had given up trying to read the words and was now just scanning the drawings and paintings. That’s when he came to a large leather-bound book with two straps and buckles that held it shut. He undid the buckles and opened the book to find that it was, in fact, a box with a hinged lid, the inside of which was a mirror. Inside the box was a roll of parchments tied with a black ribbon and two smaller leather-bound volumes, the first of which had a title scorched on to the front. Asa lifted the book, held it to the mirror and read the title:

This was it! He had found it. He didn’t even bother to open the book but put it back into the mirrored box with the roll of paper and shut the lid. He placed the box in his hiding place and started to load the rest of the work back into the trunk. Without the box there was extra space in the trunk and as he pushed the lid closed the mechanisms whirled back into action and the trunk locked itself shut.