Welcome to the third episode of Notes from an Imaginary Place

Library

It takes, as it always does, nearly forever to find the library. The entrance is hidden in one of the thickets between the trees. For all the times the babysitter has been there—all the Tuesdays, most of the Thursdays, the occasional Mondays and Fridays—it still looks more like the ghost of a door than an actual door, right up until the moment he shoos the twins through it and follows.

They go down the spiral stair that rings with every footfall. The twins, who’ve been dragging behind in the interminable woodland search phase of the outing, clang ahead now with the sound of at least six kids. Go out into the atrium which, like the rest of the library, is lit with a leaf-strained dappled light effect that is, if anything, more realistic than the actual forest upstairs.

“You’ve got your bracelets?” asks the babysitter, and the twins give matching desultory waves of their left wrists. The bracelets wink gold and green then turn back to just being glass the color of shadow. His own bracelet will ping and pulse if the twins wander too far from each other or from him. Not that this is much of a problem—although Tharmenoa prefers non-fiction with lots of diagrams, mostly diagrams of machines, and Belaserrin prefers fantastical tales, generally about birds, usually about birds on quests, those two sections butt up against each other at the narrow end of the lily pool. Once they retrieve their selections, they generally sit on the steps that lead down to the pool. The babysitter can keep an eye on them from the far side of the pool while still letting them feel like they’re out free and on their own.

And the babysitter can do a little reading of his own. Today, a verse chronicle of Third Cyclonic Empress.

“Is that good?”

He’s startled by a librarian—she isn’t two feet from his elbow, and he hadn’t seen. The librarians’ uniform is a jumpsuit with short multicolored vertical stripes between brown-black horizontal stripes, a pattern that lets her blend right in with the shelves, much as the library entrance blends into the forest.

“Oh yes,” he says. “Best one they’ve done since the haiku sequence about the Eastern Wastelands.”

“Loved that one,” says the librarian as she slips back among the shelves.

The babysitter just manages to get lost again in the rhymes and the court intrigue when he becomes aware of the twins flanking him.

“There’s something in the water,” says Tharmenoa.

“Something moving,” says Belaserrin.

There is something; the babysitter can see it. “Don’t get too close. We’ll find one of the librarians. Step back a bit. That’s it. You too, Belas.”

The thing comes up closer to the surface. A toad-faced fish with eyes that look too small for its head and gills that open and close like the riffling of a book’s pages.

Tharmenoa has leaned forward but stumbles back as the fish releases a huge bubble from its mouth.

The librarian reappears like a ghost materializing out of the stacks. “Read to it! Quickly!”

“Do you mean me?” says Belaserrin.

“Or me?” says Tharmenoa.

“Both of you,” says the librarian. “All of us.” And she grabs the nearest book and starts quoting agricultural statistics at the water.

The fish bobs its head in time to her words, as if it’s listening.

Tharmenoa and Belaserrin start frantically paging through their books to find a good place to start.
The librarian looks up from her text, looks right at the babysitter. “You too, verse chronicle.”

Tharmenoa starts, “The more quickly the counterweight (J) descends, um, the more rapidly the rope (K) pulls the cage (L) up on the other side…”

Belaserrin chimes in, “When the fire eagle had reached the lake beyond the mountain…”

The babysitter begins to read with them, in what he hopes isn’t too singsongy a voice.

The toad-faced fish drifts up so that its snout comes out of the water like a warty island, then the whole fish sinks rapidly out of sight.

“Keep reading,” says the librarian. “Maybe a little louder, so it can hear us all the way down.” She begins to declaim yearly grain yields in a voice that would fill a small stadium.

The twins don’t need encouragement to shout in the library, and are soon nearly shrieking through huge grins.

More library patrons emerge from the stacks. Some hang back and watch but most step to the edge of the pool and add their voices and their books to the din. Encyclopedia entries about mandolins, staircases, and mirrors; mysteries about engineers; gardening epics; ghost stories specifically for readers in their late thirties; romances about healers; cooking manuals; generational sagas about weather forecasters. It sounds like someone is singing their book in the midst of the cacophony, several someones in fact, and they seem to be harmonizing, although they’re all reading from different books.

The babysitter, for his part, just focuses on pushing each syllable out as distinctly as possible, even if it gives his words the cadence of a punch-press. He is as surprised as anyone when the toad-faced fish reappears from the murk of the pool and hauls itself up onto the first step of the wall around the pool just below where he’s standing. It spits something out of its mouth, something round that threatens to roll back into the pool.

“Catch it!” says the librarian.

The babysitter looks for somewhere to set his book down—the librarian snatches it from him. “Quick!” She pushes him.

The fish retreats with a startled look in its tiny eyes and the babysitter feels a moment’s guilt at having disturbed it. He bends down and picks up the ball, which is gold-colored and very cold. His fingertips stick to its surface as he turns it over. It is carved with designs, faces like you see on pictures of the sun in the less reputable almanacs.

“Bring it up,” says the librarian. “Hold it so everyone can see.”

Everyone has stopped reading to watch him. The toad-faced fish sinks back into the obscurity of the depths.

The ball is frozen honey, so cold that his fingers ache to the second knuckle, but it’s melting, the sun faces already starting to stretch and blur.

The librarian puts a hand on his shoulder. “This can get messy. Try not to get too much on yourself.”

He holds it out so the honey drips onto the utilitarian, beige carpet, soaks into the worn fabric, and then begins to puddle. The twins crowd in from each side to get a better look.

It takes a while for the golden ball to melt completely. The babysitter moves his arm now and then, to keep the blood circulating and to keep melted honey from running down his sleeve. He smells summer fields, wildflowers, and lightning bugs, but has no idea if anyone else can smell the same—the librarian, the twins, or any of the other library patrons, all of whom watch him intently with their books closed on their fingers to save their places.

In the center of the melted ball is a tight knot of wings and legs and faceted eyes that stirs and jerkily unfolds itself into a quartet of dragonflies, which tremble in his hand, nibbling a little at the honey still on his fingertips and rotating their heads as if studying the crowd of library patrons while their wings straighten and crisp. Then they vibrate into the air all at the same moment and some of the onlookers clap with muffled hand-on-book applause.

The dragonflies spiral down around the babysitter, down to the pool of melted honey, which has darkened with the ground-in dirt it’s absorbed out of the carpet. They drag their tails through the stickiness—the babysitter’s heart flutters with a moment of panic that they might be trapped and become an amber lump forever on the library floor. But the dragonflies dart across the lily pool to a large sheet of paper held at the sides by several assistant librarians and a few library patrons.

The dragonflies skim the paper, leaving curves and lines that, as they cross and re-cross each other in flight, form letters and words, and as they return to the puddle for more dirty honey, accumulate into sentences and paragraphs. The piece of paper is the size of a small bedsheet and the dragonflies seem to have plenty of carpet-soaked honey. They will be writing something quite long. The babysitter and the twins make their way around the lily pool to get a closer look.

The babysitter has just glimpsed the first lines (“It took, as it always did, nearly forever to find the library. The entrance was hidden in one of the thickets between the trees.”) when the librarian jumps out.

“Woops, no!” she says. “That’s not for you. Not yet.” She herds the three of them toward the stairs. “You’ll be able to check out a copy in a year and a day, not before. Library rules. Sorry.” And she blocks their access to anything but the stairs. They make their way slowly and noisily back to ground level.

“What was that?” says Belaserrin.

“I’m not sure,” says the babysitter. “It sounds like we’ll be able to find out, we just have to wait.”

“It could use more diagrams,” says Tharmenoa. “Everything can use more diagrams.”

Already, looking back, the babysitter can’t see the door through which they’ve just come. Looking forward, he can’t see the path home, but the twins are already starting down it, and he can follow where they lead.