He leaned out from the old wooden sign like someone leaning from a window to look down at her. His green face was fissured with age, and the corners of his mouth were stretched wide by two thick green vines that sprang from them. The carved vines curled upward around his head and wound along the edge of the sign, until they met below and branched into the letters that spelled the name of the shop – The Green Man.
The sign swayed in the wind. As it swayed, it creaked. To O’s sleepy mind, the creaking sounded like an ancient voice, struggling to speak. She stood transfixed beneath the sign while Aunt Emily searched for her keys.
O had never seen anything like it before. What could such a strange thing mean? she wondered. It frightened and yet fascinated her. There was something deeply human in the grotesque figure, something that touched her despite the green stalks spilling from his mouth.
It was almost as if he were trying to tell her something. She stared up into the ancient face, trying to make out words in the creaking voice.
“I see you’ve met my friend.”
O jumped about a foot in the air.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” said her aunt, looking up at the sign. “It was he who first drew me into this shop. I look on him as a sort of guardian spirit, watching over me.
“There,” she said as she opened the door. “Welcome to the Green Man.”
Even in the faint light of day, there seemed something magical about the shop. It was as if it had wandered from a different time and place and set itself down here, on a street corner in Caledon.
O picked up her suitcase and hauled it inside. The smell of dust and old books greeted her as she stood in the deep shadows just inside the door, while her aunt wandered off to turn on the lights.
“Don’t move,” Aunt Emily warned her. Then the lights came on and O saw why.
Books were everywhere. The outer walls were lined with shelves of them from floor to ceiling. Two freestanding ranges of books ran the length of the shop, each of them six feet high and crowned with spires of still more books. The two ranges divided the shop into three narrow aisles, one running down the center and two along the sides.
The narrow aisles were made narrower still by box upon box of books stacked at the base of the shelves along each aisle. Some of the boxes were open, their loose flaps like vines launching across a tenuous jungle path, threatening to reclaim it as part of itself. Others had split like ripe pods and spilled their contents onto the floor.
Aunt Emily flicked on another light at the rear of the shop, revealing even more unpacked boxes ranged around an enormous wooden desk, crowned with precarious piles of books.
O could see now what the Green Man was trying to tell her in his creaky, vine-choked voice: “Turn around, girl. Go home! You don’t want to go in there.”
She picked up the suitcase and threaded her way down the center aisle, toward the back of the shop.
“Things have gotten a little out of hand,” said her aunt sheepishly, as they stood and looked back at the chaos of the shop. “Don’t tell your father.”
Turning from the desk, she walked toward the book-lined wall beside it. She reached up under a shelf, and, as if by magic, a door swung open in the wall of books, revealing a narrow set of stairs that launched up steeply to the second floor.
Aunt Emily flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. “Can you manage that suitcase by yourself?” she called back over her shoulder as she started up the stairs.
Drifts of books were piled at the sides of stairs all the way up – books in the process of making their way up or down. Halfway up, her aunt sidestepped one of the stairs.
“Must you always sit on the steps?” she muttered.
“Pardon me?”
“Oh, not you, my dear. It’s Mallarmé. He insists on sitting on the stairs. Not a thing I can do about it.”
There was no one there, but O sidestepped the stair anyway.
Aunt Emily opened the door at the head of the stairs, and they entered a kitchen. A lean white cat was up on the table, licking milk from the bottom of a cereal bowl. It took one look at the stranger, launched off the table, and disappeared down a hall.
“That’s Psycho,” said Aunt Emily. “It will quickly become clear why she has that name.”
The state of the kitchen was a variation on the theme established downstairs. There was clutter everywhere. The only things that looked in place were the dustpan and broom that hung from a hook inside the door. It appeared as though they hadn’t been taken down for some time.
They crossed the kitchen and started up another flight of steps. If she had to haul this suitcase up one more flight, thought O, she would be the one having the next heart attack.
The stairs deposited them before a door on a dim landing, with no more stairs in sight. Aunt Emily reached up and took a key down from the ledge above the door.
“When I first moved here, this was where I used to write,” said her aunt. “I use it mostly for storage now.” She turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. They stepped inside.
“I’m afraid it’s a little musty. I’ll open the window and air it out a bit.”
O set down her suitcase and looked around. So this was what she’d traveled two and half days through train hell for! She could have cried. It was the saddest-looking room she’d ever seen. The low ceiling sloped sharply to one side. A folded cot stood in a corner, covered in plastic sheeting. Other pieces of furniture hid beneath drapings of white cloth. A dozen boxes were scattered over the dusty floor, with the inevitable books piled on them.
After a bit of a struggle, Aunt Emily opened the window and a breeze blew into the room. The drapings on the furniture rustled like woken ghosts. The covers of a few stray paperbacks fluttered open, flapping their mute tongues.
“Nothing a little tidying won’t cure,” said her aunt. “I’ll go fetch a broom and some rags.” And off she went, leaving O rooted to the spot, unable to imagine turning the room into anything livable.
—
Over the next hour, working together, they shifted the boxes over against one wall, swept the floor, removed the plastic sheeting and opened out the cot. They slipped the white drapings from the furniture, uncovering a large old dresser with a mirror, an elaborately carved bookcase – miraculously empty – and a cherrywood secretary desk with a matching chair.
“This desk belonged to my grandfather,” said Aunt Emily, lowering the leaf to dust inside. “It was passed on to me when he died. I first began to write while sitting at this desk – long ago and far away.
“Now, I’m sure we can find some curtains for that window. The door beside it leads to a little deck outside. I used to sit there in the warm weather and sun myself. It has a nice view of the neighborhood. Just don’t wander too close to the edge. It’s quite a drop.”
Off she went again and returned a few minutes later, carrying a bundle of bedsheets, a pillow, and a pair of red brocade curtains. Standing on the chair, Aunt Emily hung the curtains. To O, it felt like a piece of a puzzle falling into place, and she wondered if these curtains had hung here when her aunt used the room.
They made the bed together, tucking the corners in securely, spreading the sheet and blanket, and plumping the pillow.
“There,” said Aunt Emily. “I’ll leave you to yourself now. I’m sure you must be exhausted. The bathroom’s downstairs, along the hall. And if you’re hungry, you know where the kitchen is.”
“Thanks. I think I’ll just get some sleep.”
“Good. I’ll see you when you get up, then.” Her aunt looked as if she was about to say something else. But then she turned and left the room, quietly closing the door behind her.
O sat down on the edge of the bed. There was no doubt about it; the woman was a little strange. She thought about unpacking her suitcase into the dresser drawers, putting her few books on a shelf of the bookcase, tucking her journal and sheaf of poems away in the drawer of the secretary. She thought about putting on her pajamas.
Instead, she lay back on the bed. She heard the drone of traffic in the distance, the opening and closing of doors and drawers as Emily moved about in the kitchen below. The bedsprings groaned beneath her.
The curtains, patterned with a repeating motif of roses, glowed red against the light. As the breeze blew through the open window, it gently rustled the roses. They seemed to drift through space. O felt herself drifting with them.
Suddenly the room seemed filled with their scent. As she teetered on the edge of sleep, O felt a little flutter of unease. But it was only a flutter, and, in an instant, she was asleep.