Ithaca bound, p.5
Ithaca Bound, page 5
The temptation to go to bed was high, but she should tidy the mess downstairs. She’d win no awards for Housekeeper of the Year, but she could clean up the rotten wood, which she could at least use for firewood. Blessed with three separate fireplaces, she would need the wood.
First she closed the door, flicking the lock. No more leaving it unlocked for all and sundry to walk in. Next, she picked up the intruder’s card. Pearly white paper stock, thick with golden print, it felt, and looked like a banker’s card. She’d seen enough of those strewn across her father’s huge roll top partners desk over the years. But the type on the card destroyed that assumption. It was for Anson Darby, Archaeologist, Tyne River University. He was probably here about the bloody altar. She dropped the card onto the hall stand.
There were too many things to worry about. The metal detectorist, the altar, and now the archaeologist. Not to mention her visions. At least the barking dogs had disappeared. She’d ask around in case they belonged to a local farmer, but for now she had to lie down. The headache was killing her.
CHAPTER 10
THE IMAGINED LIBRARY
‘I can’t believe this town doesn’t have a library. Who made that decision?’ Lillian commented to the woman sitting across from her.
Jesha Martin chewed her chicken burger and took a sip from her tea before answering. ‘They shut it ages ago. There was a petition asking the council to reverse their decision, but then the newspaper said there were better things for the town to spend their money on, so the closure went ahead.’
‘Better things?’
‘Getting more tourists in, you know, that sort of thing.’
Lillian mulled over Jesha’s answer as the pair sat together, the rest of the cafe empty, the floor sticky with spilled kombucha. It didn’t seem like the council’s prioritisation of the tourist dollar had kicked in. Jesha had been the only friend she’d made to date, literally bumping into her in the Sainsbury queue. The first local who hadn’t narrowed their eyes and called her ‘Nero’ under their breath.
‘What happened to the books?’
‘The books?’
‘The books from the library? They must have put them somewhere. Stacked them in a basement, or attic, or wherever?’
Jesha shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, everything’s on the internet.’
Lillian didn’t agree with her, but would not jeopardise their burgeoning friendship over a difference of opinion about the priceless nature of a library.
‘I know where they are,’ said a newcomer.
Lillian checked out the new arrival and had the uncomfortable experience of thinking someone had slipped a gauze mask over her eyes. The girl was albino white — her white/blonde hair indistinguishable from her pale skin. Only the pink rims around her watery blue eyes gave any depth of colour to the girl.
‘You living at Ithaca Farm, right?’ the watery apparition said.
‘Yes,’ Lillian said.
‘This is Apple Collings,’ Jesha said, her consonants short and sharp.
‘I live down the road from your farm.’
‘Sorry I haven’t been over to say hello.’
‘You haven’t missed much. It’s just me and my dad. And he’s not the welcoming type unless you’ve lived here for the last four hundred years.’
Lillian clocked Jesha’s grimace, her mouth full of limp salad.
‘Anyway, I can show you where the books are. It’s not an ideal location, but at least they didn’t chuck them in the incinerator,’ Apple said.
‘Who throws books in an incinerator?’
‘Happens all the time,’ Apple replied. ‘How about I meet you outside when you’re finished? It only takes a few minutes to walk there. Everywhere is only a few minutes away.’
Before Lillian could reply, Apple was up and away, her white head bobbing unhindered through the still empty cafe.
‘Are you going to go with Apple to look at those books?’
‘I guess so. I don’t have anything else to do until I get the archaeologist’s approval. And there’s a chance I might find something useful from a historical context.’
‘I’ll give you one piece of advice. If you’re seen with Apple, there won’t be anyone else you could hang out with. Just giving you fair warning, most people think she is weird, and you’re already suffering a little from that tag too, if I’m being honest.’
Jesha’s phone shrilled, capturing her attention, signalling the end of her warning.
‘I have to go. I’ll see you later,’ she said. ‘Remember what I said about Apple.’
Lillian was still recovering from Jesha’s astonishing comments and quick exit, when a familiar face appeared at the table. Badger.
‘How was lunch?’ he asked.
‘Filling,’ Lillian said.
‘I saw you talking to Apple.’
‘And are you going to tell me not to talk to her, either? Are we in high school?’ she snapped.
Badger threw up his arms. ‘I would never say that, I was just making an observation.’
‘I was just leaving. I’ve got a meeting to get to,’ she said.
‘Hello Nero. Seen any more Roman soldiers lately?’ sang a voice from behind Badger, and a pair of painted talons snaked around Badger’s waist and Holly slithered into view, her smile as fake as the Cartier watch on her wrist.
‘Got to go,’ Lillian said.
As she walked away, she glanced back and saw Badger removing Holly’s hands from around his waist, and the resulting look of malice on Holly’s face.
Lillian shivered as she stood outside the cafe waiting for the ghostly Apple. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since the day before, and she hadn’t come prepared for the low afternoon temperature. Wrapping her arms around herself, she pushed herself into the corner of the portico, out of the wind.
‘There you are, almost didn’t see you,’ Apple said, before laughing at her own joke. ‘Mostly people say that to me, “Oh Apple, we didn’t see you there. You blend into the walls so well.”’
Lillian blushed. She’d been thinking something similar — that Apple was the same colour as the white pillars framing the cafe’s historic entrance.
‘Come on, I’ll take you to Pram’s place,’ Apple whispered, her eyes darting around.
‘Pram?’
‘He’s the guy looking after the books.’
They crossed a road featuring the original pavers from hundreds of years ago, re-purposed from the stones forming Hadrian’s Wall. The chill in the wind lowering the temperature even further.
‘It’s only autumn, and I’m already freezing,’ Lillian said through chattering teeth. ‘I can’t imagine how I’ll cope with winter.’
Apple, wearing a bulky anorak, didn’t answer. She had her head down and hood up, avoiding the gawping pedestrians on the street. How could adults behave like that? But Apple didn’t seem to notice. Lillian assumed she was used to it, sadly.
‘We’re here,’ Apple announced, pulling up outside a small church set back from the road.
‘The library books are in the church?’
‘No, in the hall behind St Marks. We have to go in around the back. There’s no front entrance.’
Lillian followed Apple through the graveyard, picking her way through the haphazard arrangement of headstones smothered by creeping vines and wayward brambles.
‘I guess they haven’t buried anyone here in a while then,’ she joked, trying to keep an irrational panic at bay.
Apple ignored her again, ploughing through the Victorian graveyard.
‘Okay,’ Lillian muttered. Maybe following this strange girl was a mistake? Maybe Jesha and Badger were right, that it didn’t pay to hook up with the outcasts in a new town because it tarred you with the same brush, marking you as weird for the rest of your life.
‘Here we are,’ Apple said, knocking on a weathered wooden door.
As the door opened, the pungent aroma of knowledge drifted out. A scent tainted with dust and delicate paper, well known in libraries and book stores everywhere.
The person who greeted them was as far removed from what Lillian could ever have expected. As old as the books he protected, his wrinkled skin was parchment thin, with limbs barely able to support his anorexic body and tiny head.
‘Ah, Miss Apple, you have come back, and with a friend. Come in, come in,’ he sang, putting aside the small animal he’d been whittling before they arrived, delicate wood shavings decorating his woollen vest.
Apple motioned Lillian to follow her in and Lillian smiled at the old man, still marvelling at the apparition before her. Not only did he look out of place in the library, but he looked like he was in entirely the wrong century.
Lillian stepped into a wonderland, a forest of tottering books, obscuring every window and every inch of wall. The floor was reduced to a narrow galley-like space where no stroller or wheelchair could ever navigate. Despite the cavernous space being filled with a mishmash of wooden shelves and cast off aluminium carcasses, not a single inch of shelf space remained. Half of the spines wore protective plastic covering — lovingly dressed by a librarian in a prior life. Some were naked, their spines suffering from various stages of sun damage. One impressive tome perched fat with water damage, its buff pages and glue swelling from beneath the now inadequate binding.
‘What is this place?’ Lillian asked.
‘Heaven,’ Apple replied, moving effortlessly through the stacks on the floor.
‘How’d they all end up here?’
‘Most of them we moved ourselves when the council turned the library into a tourist information centre. They said we didn’t need a library, as there was a bigger one in Newcastle. They’d planned to incinerate all the books, so we moved them here. Word got out amongst those who care about books, and now the locals leave boxes of book donations at the door for us, but sometimes the weather gets to them before we do. We have to keep it quiet, though. Not everyone approves of what we’re doing…’
‘The church offered to build a cupboard for us outside, to protect any donations, but they haven’t got the funds since a storm damaged their roof last winter. So…’ the old man said.
‘Lillian, this is Pramod Sharma, head librarian of the unofficial Hexham Library.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ Lillian said.
‘You’re the girl from Ithaca Farm?’
‘According to the lawyers, yes.’
The man appeared to appraise her, staring into her soul.
‘It’s a special place, your farm. Plenty of history, or so I’ve heard.’
‘What’s new this week?’ Apple interrupted, and the pair disappeared off behind a partition, leaving Lillian to her own devices.
She wandered through the narrow aisles, her fingers brushing against the spines of the rescued books. She noticed an ad hoc form of order to the chaos. Although space was an issue, the librarian had done his best to shelve like with like, positioning Dan Brown up against Jeffrey Archer and Clive Cussler, leaving Harper Lee to rub shoulders with Cormac McCarthy on one side, and William Faulkner on the other.
‘Is there a local history section?’ Lillian called out.
‘Keep going towards the back, and on the left before the big black cabinet, you’ll see the shelves of local stuff. It’s fiction and non-fiction, but from around here,’ Apple shouted back.
Lillian picked her way past cardboard cartons spewing books from their collapsed sides, avoiding an avalanche of yellow post-it notes peeping out from the covers of hundreds of books waiting for their new forever homes. Notes with suggested categories for shelving crossed out and rewritten, sometimes more than once, and in half a dozen different hands.
The cabinet was monstrous, originally from the library of a stately home, where its shelves caressed expensive leather-clad folios. But now, with its doors removed and its edges scuffed by decades of wanton duty in a building far beneath it, it was now a repository for books of dubious morals — books by Nalini Singh and E. L. James seared the shelves together with erotic novels by Sylvia Day and Jackie Collins.
Turning left at the cabinet, Lillian found what she wanted — a treasure trove of discontinued local tomes and remaindered works of fiction from a bygone era, rescued from being pulped and sold at railway stations and school book fairs and car boot sales, living out their days at the makeshift Hexham Library.
Dry academic books detailing the local ecology, books about Vindolanda fort and life two thousand years ago, and a series of walking guides detailing the best way to walk Hadrian’s Wall. Lillian flicked through the Countryside walking guides, not because she had any interest in hiking through miles of cow dung and festering swamps, but more for any mention of Ithaca Farm.
A pink child-sized stool sat dusty in the corner, and despite the stool’s stature, Lillian sat on it, deciding that sitting was better than standing given the headache lingering at the back of her head.
With a stack of reference books at her feet, she checked the indexes for any mention of the farm. After powering her way through several dozen books, she found three likely candidates, leaving the surrounding space looking as if a tornado had torn through the ancient floorboards. The mess was so bad, that when Apple reappeared Lillian blushed, and stammered out an apology.
Apple waved away her words. ‘It looks like you’re separating the fiction books from the nonfiction, although who knows what’s true and what’s not? It could all just be alternative facts,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t stress. Pram is more than happy for us to file the books anyway we think makes sense. We can tidy it up later but we should get going cause it’s getting dark and Pram needs to lock up.’
‘How do I check these out?’ Lillian asked, gesturing to her three books.
‘You don’t. You take them and bring them back when you’re finished. Or bring back different books to replace them if you want to keep those. We don’t operate as a normal library, more like those little free libraries you see on the side of the road, but on a bigger scale.’
Apple walked Lillian out of the de facto library, and they waved their goodbyes to Pram, leaving him sitting on a matching pink stool, paging through an old National Geographic magazine. In the failing light, he resembled a muted watercolour, sun-faded and slightly out of focus.
The girls promised to catch up later and Lillian started walking back to her car, the extra reference books heavy in her bag. To lighten the strain, Lillian took one out to read as she walked along the narrow lane.
Finding a parking space in the historic town was almost as hard as navigating the arcane council planning division, and she had to back track several times after forgetting where she’d left the ancient Land Rover.
Speeding cars forced her into patches of wild blackberry, their thorns plucking at her shivering legs, drawing thin lines of blood. The weather had turned, with the mild autumn giving way to a wintery chill, which caressed her legs and snaked its way down her collar to settle on her chest.
A filthy lorry thundered along the laneway, belching black smoke, only inches between its scarred sides and the rock walls lining both sides of the road. With the driver’s head buried in his cellphone, he didn’t see Lillian, obscured as she was by the lowering dusk. Screaming, she scrambled towards the wall, desperate to escape the menacing vehicle.
The driver looked up from his phone, shock flooding his doughy features. He had no where to go. There was no room for evasive manoeuvres, no vacant space for him to veer left or right. His brakes squealed, the heavy lorry lurching to a stop, burnt rubber staining the road — the brakes well past their use-by date.
Billowing in the wind behind the lorry were the torn pages from a book first published in 1937, Digging Up The Past by Sir Leonard Woolley. Of Lillian, there was no sign.
CHAPTER 11
WE’VE FOUND A SPY
Lillian stumbled, falling to her knees, before scrambling up again, her sense of direction warped by the strange vista around her.
Her farm boasted one old oak standing guard over the house, and that was it. Earlier generations of farmers before her had pruned, cut, dug up, pulled out, or poisoned everything unprofitable at Ithaca Farm, without realising that true wealth came from the symbiosis between the living creatures and the land which hosted them. And this field was not a manicured pasture suffering from decades of chemical fertiliser and overgrazing. She was not in Kansas anymore.
The shouts were louder, following her. A group of men lit by torchlight. Not battery powered torchlight, but flaming torches, like those from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Eyes wild, Lillian spun straight into the arms of a stranger. No, not a stranger, the man with the gold.
‘Come here,’ he snarled.
There was no time to run before the men with the torches reached them. These weren’t lorry drivers, or refugees escaping from people smugglers, but men dressed as Roman soldiers, as centurions. Had the world gone mad?
‘Let me go. The police are on their way,’ she bluffed.
‘Ho, Marcus, did you catch a spy?’ called out a burly man, his broad shoulders encased in thick leather pads.
Her captor appraised her under the torchlight. ‘I’m not sure who she is, Gaius. She could be a spy for the Iceni?’ he responded to the giant. ‘This could be the bitch that let them into the fort. The guards said that they’d seen a woman fleeing just as the Iceni attacked.’
‘Take her to the Commander. He’ll know,’ Gaius said, his giant hand never straying from the short sword at his hip.
What language were they speaking? Latin? Latin of all languages, and for the first time in her life, she thanked her lucky stars that she’d worked so hard in her Latin classes. Old Mrs Shears would be so proud of her now.
‘Where are we?’ she rasped.
Marcus jabbed at her side. ‘Don’t you play dumb with me. Mention the gold, and I’ll make sure they display your head on a pike for everyone to see. Where the ravens will pluck out your spying eyes and the maggots will feast on your pagan brain,’ he whispered, pinching the soft skin on the underside of her arm.
