Tilly started and the book fell shut on her bed, and in the blink of an eye it all disappeared.
illy sat on her bed, staring at the copy of Alice.
She was thinking about when she’d accidentally pulled the secret garden out into her bedroom just before Christmas, and the fairytale forest that had escaped on to the train to Paris. She picked the book up again, a little gingerly, and turned over a few pages to the passage where Alice meets the tricksy caterpillar that sits on top of a mushroom.
Wanting to know more about what was happening, she tried to concentrate on pulling that scene out of the book, but all she managed was to make her bedroom smell like mushrooms. Tilly put the book down again and reached across for the large, ornate key that had stayed put even when the secret garden that had erupted into her bedroom had gone. She looked round her room, wondering if anything had been left behind this time – maybe another clue even – but there was only the faintest scent of spring grass in the air.
‘I bet the Underwoods would love to know about this,’ she said, smiling to herself. ‘They might have been able to stop me travelling inside books, but they haven’t stopped the stories coming to me.’
But her satisfaction in slipping round the edges of the Underwoods’ rules didn’t last long. After all, Melville and Decima were, at that very moment, in Pages & Co. The siblings looked like twins – both slender, blond and cold – but were less alike in character. Melville occupied the most powerful position at the Underlibrary, but it was his sister, Decima, who was the brains behind the operation. Melville had manipulated his way to the top with sly words and charm that he turned on and off as easily as a light bulb, while it was Decima who understood book magic, and what you could do with it. She was the one who had realised that some of the everlasting nature of stories might be contained in Tilly’s half-fictional blood.
Even though she was four floors up, and separated from them by several doors, at least one of which was locked, Tilly felt as though she could sense them downstairs and her knees started to fidget as she resisted the urge to go and stand up for herself. She was saved from having to decide whether to disobey Grandad by a soft knock on her door.
‘It’s Bea,’ her mum said. ‘I mean, it’s Mum.’
After Bea had been away for so long, trapped in A Little Princess for eleven years, they still hadn’t quite settled on what Tilly should call her, and sometimes neither term felt quite right.
‘Come in,’ Tilly called and her mum slipped round the door.
‘How are you doing?’ Bea asked, moving the copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland out of the way and sitting next to Tilly on the bed.
Tilly shrugged, not sure what to say. ‘Kind of scared, and kind of confused, and kind of frustrated,’ she said. ‘I suppose?’
‘All of that makes sense,’ Bea said.
‘Do you know what the Underwoods want?’ Tilly asked.
‘Not yet. Your grandad whisked me away just as they were arriving.’
‘But they can’t do anything bad, can they?’ Tilly said. ‘There are customers around.’
‘I hope not,’ said Bea. ‘But I don’t know, Tilly. Whatever they want unnerved Seb enough to call ahead. We’ll find out when your grandparents come up and get us. But while we’ve got a moment to ourselves …’ Bea glanced around and her eyes settled on Tilly’s collection of clues. ‘Tell me again what you’ve worked out.’
‘You believe me?’ Tilly said.
‘I always believe you,’ Bea said. ‘And I want to try and understand what you’re saying about the Archive, because I for one cannot bear just sitting around, waiting to see what those creepy siblings are going to do next, especially when they’re so focused on you.’
‘So, there’s that string of numbers and letters that we found in that pamphlet,’ Tilly said, forgetting a little of her fear as she got to explain her theory to someone who was taking it seriously. ‘And Grandad said it looked like a classmark, which is how you find books in a library.’
‘Right,’ Bea agreed. ‘And therefore you think it’s telling us we need to go and find something at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, because the zip code matches the address of that building?’
‘Yep, exactly,’ Tilly said. ‘See, it’s not complicated.’
‘But what about all this other stuff?’ said Bea, pointing to the objects on Tilly’s shelf. ‘How do they all link up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Tilly admitted. ‘But surely they found their way to me on purpose? And Oskar’s grandma, in Paris, she said that there’s a map to the Archive.’
‘How do you turn a key, a ball of thread and some breadcrumbs into a map?’ Bea asked.
‘Maybe map is the wrong word,’ Tilly said, looking up at her mother. ‘I think it might be more of a treasure hunt.’
‘I’ve always liked treasure hunts.’ Bea smiled. ‘And I think it’s probably fair to assume that finding the most secretive group of bookwanderers that have ever existed would involve a little more effort than following a dotted line.’
‘Exactly,’ Tilly said, pleased. ‘But what can we do about it stuck here?’
‘There are always options,’ Bea said. ‘And—’ But she was interrupted by a knock at the door.
Tilly’s bedroom door opened to show Grandma, her face pale with worry.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said quietly.
‘What did they want?’ asked Tilly nervously.
‘Come downstairs and have a cup of tea and a slice of cake and we’ll talk properly,’ Grandma said. ‘We’ve closed the shop for the rest of the day.’
Ten minutes later, the four members of the Pages family assembled round their battered old kitchen table. Grandma had been stress-baking ever since the Source Editions had been bound and they were all picking at slices of carrot cake with cream-cheese icing, too worried to enjoy it.
‘So?’ Bea said, a little impatiently.
‘The Underwoods are keen to understand more of your heritage, Tilly,’ Grandad started. ‘They were all forced smiles today, aiming to sweet-talk us on to their side.’
‘They want compliance among bookwanderers,’ Grandma said. ‘They would like us, and you, to help them willingly.’
‘But why on earth would we do that?’ Tilly said, baffled.
‘Well, quite,’ said Grandad forcefully. ‘But they’re trying to set themselves up as legitimate guardians of bookwandering, and it’s not a good look to have a former Librarian and his family so publicly against them.’
‘If they want to be seen as respectable, they shouldn’t have tried to steal a child’s blood!’ Bea said angrily.
‘Again, we’re all on the same page,’ Grandma said. And Tilly knew things were bad because usually Grandad could never resist making a joke about their surname when someone used that expression.
‘They’ve asked that Tilly voluntarily help with their research into book magic,’ he said. ‘They are positioning what they’re doing as an important exploration into how bookwandering works, and what book magic can do, with the suggestion being that anyone opposing them must be against progress.’