Page 3 of Until the Last Leaf Falls

When he next blinked, he found himself leaning against the maple. The sun had disappeared behind the house. Golden light now burnished the glade and his mind brimmed with unfamiliar stories. Men going to war. Heavily censored letters, every word cherished by the recipients, being read over and over. And other letters, laboriously penned, sent with a wish and a prayer. The images were so clear, he felt the grain of the cheap writing paper under his fingertips.

A breeze stirred the maple’s leaves and Niles straightened from his slouch.

“Thank you for waking me,” he said as if the tree had called his name. “I wouldn’t have liked to miss this golden glow.”

He watched the dimming light with a faint unease in his stomach. “Imaginary lives?” he wondered aloud. “Or real ones?”

No answer came, and Niles kept his gaze on the deepening shadows, letting the peace of his glade comfort him.

When he returned to the library to check on his compiling app and lock up for the night, a book lay on the reception desk. A thick tome, and not one Niles recognised at first glance. “I nod off in the glade one time, and of course I miss the day’s only visitor. Why didn’t they call out? And why leave a book they didn’t borrow from me?”

Despite his curiosity, Niles detoured to the coffee machine and moments later hot chocolate poured into his mug, adding to the familiar aroma of coffee and books. Niles took a sip, then made his way across the room to inspect the book.

Blue leather with gold stitching, the title embossed and gilded: The Lore of the Shires.

Few readers asked for folklore. Niles had added the classic myths and legends to his selection, but this title hadn’t been amongst them. Besides, his library was barely four years old, and its shelves held paperbacks and sturdy, linen-bound hardbacks. Leather and gilding belonged to a different age. Or a different kind of library.

The book bulged in a strange way as if an object was caught between the pages.

Niles turned the cover and found a ginkgo leaf, the deep gold veined in green. Dried leaves being used as bookmarks wasn’t unusual. Niles was about to set it aside when he saw the message written on it. In a beautiful copperplate script, it proclaimed:

You looked up today. It gladdened my heart.

The Stranger

Niles took both the book and the leaf with him as he closed the library, not sure what to make of either. The book—as he’d found out—was a compendium of local myths and legends, written over two hundred years ago. It was a first edition, too, which made it pretty much the oldest thing in his library. Probably the most valuable, too.

Niles wasn’t worried about thieves, his locks and security system were top-shelf, but he didn’t want to lose this unexpected treasure. He took both items to the glade and told his trees what had happened. But other than a fleeting sense of amusement, he felt and heard nothing.

You looked up today. It gladdened my heart.

The message didn’t leave him alone. Who’d seen him? Who’d sent it? And why? And what was so marvellous about him looking up?

Insufficient data, his rational mind told him.

“I know,” he sighed as he washed his dinner plate and then poured a second glass of wine. “I have just enough data for endless speculation.” And speculation had never done him any good.

“Sorry I’m late,” Niles mumbled as he stepped into his glade the following morning. Late and blurry-eyed after staying up into the early hours to read the book he’d been gifted.

He now knew about the local town’s connection to the Fair Folk, knew how to spot the dancing sprites in the meadow by the river, and had even learned that not stones but the petrified bodies of a coven of witches made up the ancient ring of monoliths on the hillside. After having broken their compact with the Unseen, they’d been cursed to stand unmoving until someone took pity on them and rectified their shoddy spellwork.

The book had held his interest despite the old-fashioned language, and the unfamiliar, difficult-to-read typeface, but it hadn’t identified the person who’d sent him the message and left the book. If they even were one and the same.

He explained all this to the trees as he had explained other problems in the past, but this time no solution presented itself. He only knew that someone had left a book for him with a message inside.

That wasn’t nearly enough to go on.

“Actually,” he said, as he prepared to open the library. “I have another data point. Whoever wrote the message used a leaf from the ginkgo tree outside, because it still glows with life.”

He took comfort from that tiny extra bit of information and wasn’t even surprised to find another book on his reception desk. With a scarlet maple leaf on top, and a message in silver marker.

You have such kind eyes.

Niles’s cheeks heated, despite there being nothing to be embarrassed about. He opened the book, and found that it held travellers’ tales and was as old as the compendium on local folklore.

“That’s my reading for tonight sorted.” He set the book aside, went to make coffee, and settled down to work—for once not minding he was the only soul in a place he’d built for a community.

A week passed, and every day brought another book, another pressed leaf with a message. The books—all written long before Niles had been born—made him consider nature, life, and magic in new ways. And each message made him feel seen, heard, and understood like never before.