Molly relied upon herself.
Always had, for her entire thirty years, ever since someone left her wrapped in a baby blanket on a chair in St Matthew’s church.
Sometimes it took a while, but in the end people always let her down and there was just her again, alone inside her head with whatever she was reading at the time.
Her books never failed her. They were where she went to explore other worlds inside. Where she hid when the outside got too jagged.
The local public library, where she worked Monday and Thursday afternoons, was a solid symbol of that refuge.
Its main fiction room was a big space of pale stone and brown-threaded white marble under a high domed ceiling, filled with thousands of worlds, all bound and shelved and waiting patiently to be discovered and rediscovered.
Sometimes they whispered to her.
The library was her place of peace and safety. Usually. Unless a gaggle of fourteen-year-olds from her old school were hanging around the anime and manga section, nudging each other, watching her sit on a prim wooden chair near the row of public computers.
She’d taught them History and English for their first six months in high school, until just before her twenty-seventh birthday, when a virus knocked her off her feet like a big wave crashing on a sunny beach and sweeping her out to deep cold water, all alone.
Now she was a part-time assistant librarian, trying to climb cautiously back into the world.
And those kids were vaguely familiar strangers who used to be impressed when they were young innocents, and she recited the poems she’d learned when she was their age. Jabberwocky, or The Chimney Sweeper, or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Would they still think of her as Miss Matthews?
She doubted it.
Three years was a long time. Especially when she’d been so dreadfully sick for the first one that she remembered hardly anything of it. And now, from the other side of that pivotal year, she couldn’t remember any of their names or personalities or even their voices.
Today, her shift had ended at six, and computer number nine was hers for the final half-hour slot of the day from a quarter past.
All she wanted was to catch up with posts from a few fandoms and the chronically ill spoonie community, before the library closed and left her with nowhere to go except home.
Her online places were all quiet. Everywhere would be livelier on Saturday, especially after London lunchtime when east coast America woke up and got online.
With five minutes left before the computer system closed down, she opened the Fearless forum and scanned the home page for new posts or messages.
It was deathly silent in there. She was the only member logged in and only one thread showed an active icon, from twenty-two hours earlier, when Flipper had asked if anyone was around. No one had answered her.
Tamass the Fearless had been the biggest epic series on the bookshelves when Molly got into it, and its author Paul Best the brightest name in British fantasy fiction. She’d read the first eight novels back-to-back in her sickbed when her fellow top floor lodger Cleo brought them home from the library for her, and waited hungrily for the ninth, The Siege of Ys, to be released. When that one finally appeared, she’d inhaled it in a week.
The tenth and final book of the series had been expected two years later, but Paul Best had lost his mojo, and a year past its promised release date it still hadn’t appeared. Disappointed fans all over the world had rubbished his name, and he’d disappeared from public view.
These days, if the Fearless forum had been fitted with a sound effect, it would cry like a sad desert wind.
Molly added a lonely, “I’m here,” reply to Flipper’s post, then logged out and went to find the series on its shelf.
All nine of the heavy hardback novels were available, as well as the slightly different second edition of the first book.
Two copies of each volume, all there on the shelf. It was a reflection of what had happened to the Fearless forum since the wonderful days when it had been chock-a-block with people and conversation and fun and excitement.
She checked out The Siege of Ys, again, and dropped it into her haversack alongside her empty plastic water bottle and her plastic pillbox.
The kids had left. The library didn’t shut until seven, but at ten-to there were only three adult customers remaining.
Alex worked her way around the room, securing doors and high windows, smiling at Molly when she passed, while Diane and Tony replaced armfuls of returned books on their correct shelves.
Molly flirted with the notion of nipping around to her Secret Sunday window with the broken latch at the back of the building, and curling up for a quiet reading hour in the lost property room before she went home.
But one of the others might have walked in and found her there, which would have jeopardised her peaceful Sundays.
Also, her stomach was growling and her mouth was dry.
On the top step outside the main entrance, fine greasy drizzle misted her face. Cars swished past in never-ending lines on the dual carriageway, and dazzling headlights reflected in the puddled tarmac. The sky hung low like a wet grey blanket.
She shivered and pulled up her hood, squinting against the world of stabbing yellow-white lights. She wasn’t asking for a heat wave. That would be hideous. But a few weeks of dry weather would be nice, sometime that summer.
Home was five hundred yards away, in one of the tree-lined roads behind the library. Some days it might as well have been five hundred miles, but thankfully not that day.
On the chronic illness community’s popular scale of zero-to-twelve spoons, invented by the creator of the But You Don’t Look Sick website, she had about two spoons left for the day. If she took the walk home slowly, she mightn’t even have to lie down for an hour or three to recover from it.
She descended the rain-slicked stone steps carefully and stayed close to the library’s grimy wall to avoid people hurrying past with their heads down, until she turned off the main road into frown-soothing quietness.
The Funny Friar’s heavily etched windows were all steamed up inside, making the orange glow of the pub’s internal lights seem warm and friendly from the wet pavement outside. That was a change from its normal cheap tackiness, but it was only a visual effect.
Her ear muscles twitched at a burst of familiar laughter as she passed the open outer door. It was Julie’s drunken cackle. Unmistakable. She’d probably been in the pub with Steve all day. No cooked dinner that evening, then.
Molly’s landlady hadn’t always been a drunk. She and her husband John were always party people, but Julie hadn’t hit the bottle hard until after he died. A year later, Julie’s new boyfriend Steve had moved in with them, and a week after that Molly’s friend Cleo had moved out.
“Do you know the creep’s taken the lock off our bathroom door? Claims it was broken. He’s been trying to grope me since he moved in, but Julie’s so drunk she doesn’t realise what’s going on. Or maybe she does know and just looks the other way. Anyway, I’m out of here. You should find somewhere new too. He’ll be pawing you next.”
“Nah. He doesn’t like me. Called me a cripple yesterday.”
“He’s a twat.” Cleo hugged her. “If you change your mind, call me. My new roomie’s a letting agent.”
Molly didn’t want to abandon Julie, who’d looked after her like a mum during her terrible first year of illness. That had been before John died. Before Julie got permanently drunk and had lost all her lodgers except Cleo and Molly and then brought Steve into their home.
Julie’s credit was running out, but Molly didn’t want to leave her all alone with Steve if she could help it.
He’d replaced the bathroom door lock that very morning, after Cleo had left in a cab, when Molly cornered Julie and insisted he must do it before he went to the pub or she’d leave too. So far, he’d kept his hands to himself around her. Clearly, vocal and crippled women really weren’t his type.
She let herself into the dark house and switched on the hallway light. The click was loud in the cold, dusty, empty building.
The kitchen strip light flickered into life and she slumped on a hard dining chair, forearms on the table and her head pillowed on them.
Her wet jeans clung to her burning leg muscles and stiff ankles, and the fleece hoodie stretched damp across her aching shoulders.
Seeing those old pupils in the library had reminded her of the worst time of her life.
It was a severe virus, a bewildering succession of white-coated doctors had concluded, one after the other. Very like glandular fever, but not actually glandular fever. There was nothing they could do for her, other than medicate those symptoms that responded to medication.
There was nothing she could do except rest, as if she had any choice about that, and endure the pain and sickness, as if she had any choice about that, either, and wait for it all to go away.
It didn’t go away. Two-and-a-bit years after the day when she’d collapsed at school, a doctor had finally delivered a diagnosis.
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.
He’d abbreviated the long mouthful to ME, for the benefit of her tired, foggy brain after the long bus journey she and Julie had taken to his consulting room, and then he’d explained that there was no cure. She had a long road of illness management ahead of her, and the hope that her condition might improve one day.
Molly had immersed herself in the medical science and popular self-help sections of the library for weeks after receiving the diagnosis, until she’d read just about everything about ME that had ever been printed in a book or published on a website.
Now, another year later, it was a rare non-specialist doctor who knew more about the neurological disease and its sensible management than she did.
Her skin throbbed all over, as if she’d slammed a hundred fingers in a hundred car doors, and dry thirst nagged at her until she stood up with a long groan that she would have kept inside if there’d been anyone else there.
She filled her plastic bottle with cold tap water, flicked on the kettle, and looked in the fridge for something to eat. Only cans of strong lager and a nearly empty bottle of vodka were in there, but the larder offered three curling slices of not-too-stale bread and an unopened tube of salt and vinegar Pringles.
Four steep flights of stairs to the top of the house. It was a long way to carry a Pringle sandwich and a cup of boiling hot water, but when she got there her bedside lamp filled the room with friendly gentle light, and a blueberry tea bag dunked and swirled in the cup of steaming water made her nest cosy again.
She peeled off her wet clothes and draped them over the electric oil-filled radiator. Her owl pyjamas were warm and comforting, like putting on a gentle hug. She sat on the edge of the bed to massage her bare soles against the soft, firm thickness of her beloved Shensi rug.
The Siege of Ys fell open naturally near the end of the book, at the happiest scene of the entire series.
Some weeks had passed since Tamass returned with his war-sharpened army to liberate his besieged home city.
Now he and his best friend, comrade-in-arms, and the love of his life, Nandi, were getting married in brilliant sunshine and before the entire cheering population of Ys.
Molly’s big bedtime painkillers were working before the tea had cooled. Her eyelids grew heavy. She didn’t struggle.
...
The wedding ceremony took place on a raised sandstone platform that glowed golden in the sunlight and extended out from the main castle portcullis, eventually becoming a fine quality red road running down to the sparkling river in the distance.
King Tamass and his new queen Nandi were blissfully in love. Everyone could see that, as plain as the sun burning strong in the deep blue cloudless sky above, and it seemed the thousands of people gathered there wanted to go on cheering forever.
The dignitary party on the platform retired to the castle, leaving the newlyweds waving and grinning, waving and laughing, embracing and kissing deeply for the whole world to share their joy.
Molly shared it from her window at the top of one of the castle’s tall, slender, round towers.
“Hello?”
She lurched away from the open window with a flush of guilt in her throat and whirled to see who had entered the room and spoken.
It was Sted.
Magician, scholar, Tamass’s friend and fellow adventurer, bearer of a scraggy balding head and hairy eyebrows and the longest and most complicated plaited beard Molly had ever seen, Sted was instantly recognisable from every description of him that she’d ever read.
She had been watching the wedding from his window. She was standing in his laboratory. In her bare feet. It was an amazing room filled with hundreds of big books and every possible sort of wizardly apparatus, but she didn’t know why—or how—she was there.
I’m asleep. I was reading the wedding scene and now I’m dreaming it, in my pink owl pyjamas.
“May I ask who you are?”
She strode across the slate floor towards him, her confident right hand held out to shake his. “I’m Molly. And you’re Sted. I’m pleased to meet you.”
An amused smile twitched his lips as he shook her hand. “Welcome to my chamber, but I’m afraid you have me somewhat at a disadvantage.”
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t expect you to know me. I’m no one, but I’ve read all about you in books, and now I’m dreaming that I’m here in Ys.”
Sted’s eyes grew wide. “You’re a dreamwalker! I’ve heard of this magic. Medicine workers of the East are said to practice it, but I’ve never met one of them. You are very welcome, Dreamwalker Molly.”
He ushered her to a cushioned bench seat with a panoramic view of the plain, and offered her food and drink.
She’d never warmed to Sted as a character in the books, but face-to-face he was actually quite charming. She declined his offer politely and stared around his splendid chamber, thinking she could study it for a week and still not take in every detail.
He joined her on the bench. “Are you from the East, then? From Ba?”
“I’m from London.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “London, in the world of Water. I’ve heard of your city, but have never spoken with anyone who’s visited it, never mind lived there. Today is a day of blessings.”
“Especially with the wedding.” Molly beamed. She had never felt so strong and healthy in all her life. It was more than just the absence of pain and exhaustion. Much more. She was zinging with energy.
“Indeed. I’m interested to hear of these books in which you’ve read about me.”
“Tamass the Fearless. It’s a long series of books that takes us all over your world, following the adventures of Tamass. And you, of course.”
“Of course.” He smiled. “And these books are widely read in the world of Water? Who writes them?”
“Paul Best.” Her body worked effortlessly and efficiently in this dream. No hobbling around on feet twisted by pain. She wandered over to one of his velvet-lined bookshelves, craving the opportunity to open and study a wizard’s book, but was distracted by a tall glass vial containing a deep crimson liquid that was simmering over a low flame on a bench.
She stooped and peered into it. Her reflection shone darkly, like a silhouette with a slender suggestion of features.
When she blinked and turned back to Sted, he had moved to a bench by another open window on the opposite side of the room, and the sun was low above the horizon behind him. Hours must have passed.
Dreams, eh?
He held a book in each hand. “Would you be interested in creating a magical link between us, so that you can visit me again in your dreams, but whenever you want to rather than at the whim of chance?”
The featureless pale brown book covers were identical. Calfskin?
He raised his thick eyebrows and offered a friendly smile. “Would you like that?”
“I’d like that very much.”
He handed her one of the soft-skinned books. “So be it. Farewell, Dreamwalker Molly, until we meet again.”
...
Terrible pain.
Her bedside lamp still glowed, but pale early daylight outlined the edges of her curtains.
She stabbed her phone with a clumsy finger and glared at it with one bleary eye.
3.50AM
Her preferred morning routine involved a yoga breathing exercise and long, slow stretches before she even thought about trying to get out of bed. But on worked-yesterday mornings, leisurely waking was an impossible dream.
Her muscles ached and cramped, her skin burned everywhere, her skull was splitting open slowly, her joints were stiff, and the shoulder and hip she’d slept on hurt sickeningly.
“Agh!” Her left toes twisted in a sharp cramp. She pressed the ball and toes of that foot against the bedside wall and pushed into it until the cramp eased, although the danger of a repeat attack lurked and threatened.
Her first attempt to stand ended with her on hands and knees, head hanging while she panted and used every ounce of willpower not to vomit on the rug.
An inch of water remained in her bottle. She needed it to swill down her morning tablets.
She scrabbled for them with numb fingers that were swollen and twisted by pain, dropping two of them twice before she managed to fumble all eight on to her tongue together and swallow them with the mouthful of tepid water.
World of Water.
Where was that from?
No idea.
She curled up on the floor, dragged her eiderdown off the bed, snuggled into it, and waited.
It took twenty minutes for the painkillers to dissolve the jagged edges of her pain. Enough so she could start stretching away the night’s stiffness, anyway.
Which was getting important, because she needed a big urgent wee.
Five more precious minutes passed before she was fit to push her painful feet into soft slippers and shuffle along the landing to the bathroom.
When she was done, she filled her bottle with cold water from the bathroom tap and shuffled back to her room.
4.30AM
She drank her cold blueberry tea in one go, switched off her lamp, and drew the curtains open. The sky was growing lighter. The streetlights would turn off soon.
A tall man was standing in the shadow of one of the broad London Plane trees across the road. He looked up at the same moment she looked down.
His eyes glowed like burning coals.
Molly fell back from the window, one hand balled in a fist and pressed to her open mouth, the other splayed against the wall at her side. Her heart pounded so hard she could hear it. It throbbed in her throat. She couldn’t swallow through it.
Her mind’s eye saw only the deep darkness inside the man’s hood and his eyes glowing, like hell looking right at her.
It couldn’t be real.
It couldn’t.
She edged back to the window and looked down.
He was still there, his eyes still glowing deep red, but before she could jerk away again his gaze drew her in.
It calmed her.
Eased her fear.
Her heart rate slowed. Her residual pain faded. Her mind smoothed all its wrinkles and worries.
She stepped away from the window, wondering vaguely what it was she’d just been thinking about but not caring enough to concentrate and remember. It was too early and she was too tired to bother.
When she fell into bed, something hard beneath the pillow jabbed her shoulder.
A book.
The Siege of Ys was on her bedside table. This was another book.
She slid it out and studied its pale brown cover, even as her eyelids closed everything down and her head sank into the pillow.
Calfskin?