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“Why should I trust you?” Cassie asked.
“I don’t know,” Drummond admitted with a sigh of exasperation. “The best way to keep her safe is for us and the books we carry to be somewhere else.”
Cassie nodded at that. “I need to rest. I’m exhausted.”
Drummond watched her for a moment, obviously thinking about something.
“What?” she asked.
“I know you don’t trust me. But I have somewhere we can go, if you will take us. Somewhere that will show you why this is all so important. And maybe I can tell you my story.”
“What place?” she asked.
“My library,” he said. “If I show you a photograph of the door, can you take us?”
The Fox Library, in the Shadows
Everything was gray and insubstantial, and Cassie thought that she was floating.
It had taken her a while to open the door. She had thought she was tired or stressed, but Drummond had told her that it would be hard, that she should keep trying.
“It’s in the shadows,” he’d said.
She’d tried again, holding the Book of Doors in one hand, Drummond holding up his phone and showing a picture of a grand room, a wooden door in the corner. Then she had felt it, had gripped something with her mind, something fragile that threatened to dissipate if she pulled too hard. She had waited a moment, and then had gently tugged, and the door to Cassie’s bedroom had opened, revealing a monochrome room beyond, like watching a film on a black-and-white television.
“We go into the shadows now,” Drummond said. “We cannot speak, but don’t be frightened. All will be well soon enough.”
He had stepped past her into the room, and Cassie had followed, hesitating only briefly.
It was silent and gray, and when she walked it felt like swimming. She closed the door, watching her arm as it left ripples in the shadows as it moved, and then turned to see something like the shape of Drummond waiting.
The shape turned and Cassie followed it, wondering if this was what it was like to be dead, to be haunting a place of the living.
They left a big space and floated into a smaller space. There was a suggestion of height behind them, of light, but the Drummond shape moved in the opposite direction, toward deeper darkness. Then a line of light appeared, white and expanding, and Cassie saw the shape that was Drummond standing there. Beyond him, she realized, it wasoutsidebut still in the shadows, and that Drummond had opened the front door of the building.
The shape that was Drummond compressed and she realized that he was bending over, picking something up. Then he straightened, and there was a gesture, like tossing a piece of rubbish, and a moment later color and substance spread into the world, like liquid spilling across a table. Light chased the shadows away, and Cassie felt a breeze on her face, the smell of fresh air. Suddenly Drummond was there, standing in a grand arched doorway with a backdrop of green trees behind him, leaves and branches waving in the breeze.
“Welcome to the Fox Library,” he said. He turned away from her and walked out into the daylight.
Cassie followed Drummond, her feet crunching on a gravel driveway as she stepped out of the house. She took a few steps and turned around to look at the building, standing next to Drummond as he gazed upward at his library, his hands in his pockets and an unreadable expression on his face.
The building was a large country house built of red sandstone, with dark gray roof tiles and ironwork and guttering painted in bloodred. The doorway they had just emerged from was an archway at the bottom of a tall tower that sat on the corner of the building, with windows high up that made Cassie think of a lighthouse. On either side of the tower the building stretched away to far corners, large bay windows on the ground floor revealing glimpses of bookcases and wood paneling, and on the upper floor dormer windows turned the roofline of the building into a jumble of peaks and valleys.
Behind the building, climbing up the side of a brown mountainin the distance, pine trees in shades of green were shimmering in the cool morning wind. Overhead the sky was gray but bright, and low clouds moved steadily across it, sailing on the sea of wind. Everything, it seemed, was moving. Everything except the library, which was solidly still, like some stone rooted to the core of the earth, permanent and immobile. But there was something welcoming about the place, Cassie thought, something to do with the proportions and the size, and its warm red sandstone face.
“It’s beautiful,” Cassie said.
“Yes,” Drummond replied, smiling with a mixture of happiness and sadness. “It is.”
Cassie turned. Off to her right, beyond the gravel moat, a smooth ribbon of tarmac led away through well-kept lawns before disappearing into the trees in the distance. The line of trees stretched right around behind where they were standing and for a distance in the other direction, creating a curtain around the library and its grounds. Down at a far point of the lawn Cassie saw that they were being watched, a deer standing in the shadows, perfectly still and gazing at them.
“Deer,” she murmured.
Drummond glanced at her, and then toward where she was looking. “Yeah,” he said. “Lots of deer in the glen. This used to be a hunting estate.”
Cassie continued watching the deer. It flicked its ears and then turned and darted out of sight, back into the trees.
“We’re about six miles away from the main road,” Drummond said, even though she hadn’t asked. “Everything between here and there belongs to the Fox Library. The whole glen, the mountains. It’s a private road, so no one comes up it.”
