The Children by Melissa Albert
Dedication
To my parents, again and always
Epigraph
I held him wise, and when he talked to me
Of snakes and birds, and which God loved the best,
I thought his knowledge marked the boundary
Where men grew blind, though angels knew the rest.
—George Eliot, “Brother and Sister”
Interstitial
Rain lashed the windows. It ran in great gushes from the eaves. It plinked into the pots their mother placed around the attic and drew a thick white haze like a blanket over the sea.
Ennis kicked the wall. “Some vacation.”
Guinevere ignored him. She was looking at a book.
The woman who’d lived her entire life in this rented cottage, then died here, had been a librarian. Books lined the walls of every room. Even the bathroom had a built-in shelf of rippled paperbacks to read in the tub. Guinevere was sure she could hear the librarian’s ghost at night, moving among her collection: a soft sigh and an industrious bustle, trailing the odors of ink and tea.
Every book had some defect. Coffee stains, water damage, sticky fingerprints. Some were just old, binding coming unstitched and lost pages stuck in like bookmarks. In the back of each was a little paper pocket holding a bone-colored checkout card, stamped with distant dates and the handwritten names of borrowers.
(“I bet they’re all dead now,” Ennis said, with some satisfaction.)
One book did not have a checkout card. It had something else.
“En, come here.”
Guinevere showed her brother what she’d found. In the pocket of a mildewed hardback of The Missing Chums was a gilt-stamped card, thick and fine as a wedding invitation. At its center, a design picked out in gold. Guinevere thought it an abstract map, Ennis an odd compass rose. Neither was entirely wrong. Over it, in gold copperplate, ran the words:
Admits Two
Below, in smaller script:
Date of Travel
Beside that was a little box. Like all the little boxes on the checkout cards, it was ready to be marked with a date. Today’s date, perhaps.
Guinevere’s heart stirred in her chest like paper pages rustling. Ennis spoke before she could.
“Where’d we see those old date stamps?”
—Edith Sharpe, The Ninth City (Hart & Crane, 2000)
One
“Almost done.”
The makeup artist spoke softly, flicking a little brush over her closed eyelids.
“Take your time.” Guin tried to speak without moving her face. She hadn’t been sleeping well, and this felt like a sister to sleep. Floating in the dark, surrendering to a voice, a brush, the painterly scents of the morning show’s green room. Coffee and perfume, dust toasting on the bulbs.
The makeup artist, Alison, was fresh in from Detroit. Moved to Williamsburg for a bad boyfriend and now she lived in Crown Heights with three roommates and a drum kit that blocked the front door. She’d spent the past ten minutes detailing the despicable personal habits of each roommate before going quiet.
It was a quiet Guin recognized. Sure enough, the girl leaned closer, voice dropping. Her breath smelled strongly of matcha.
“I lived in the Ninth City,” she said.
A little charge ran up Guin’s spine.
“When I was a kid,” Alison went on, “I basically lived there. I would read the books in order, then start right back at book one.”
Softly Guin said, “Wow.”
“Yeah. Look, I’m sure you hear this all the time, but—can I tell you how much your mother’s books meant to me?”
“Of course you can.” Guin did hear this all the time. It was her job, as she saw it, to listen.
Alison breathed deep, a little catch in the throat. “When I was eight my parents got a divorce. We had to sell our house and move to a different town so they could carry two rents. I had to start at a new school midyear, and my older sister basically stopped talking, and . . . god, I was so alone.”
Her voice was edged with a familiar lace of nerves and regression. All the misfit kids who’d grown up on the Ninth City series fell straight back through time when confronted with her, the actual Guinevere Sharpe. Daughter of author Edith Sharpe, living avatar of their favorite literary character.
“I was at my lowest point when a librarian gave me your mom’s books. And they saved me. They saved my life. Here.” She tapped Guin’s folded hand. “Look.”
Guin opened her eyes. The makeup artist had her head tipped back and to the side, sleeve yanked down so Guin could see the tattooed tree crawling up her arm and across her sternum. The Architect’s tree, its branches hung with keys. “I banked every dollar I made and got it when I turned eighteen.”
“That’s amazing.” Guin pressed a palm to her heart. “She would have been honored.”
“My favorite is The Wicked Few,” Alison said confidingly. “It’s so dark, right? The scene that always gets me is when Guinevere sees her mother on the screen in the Mortal Cinema and wonders if it means she’s . . . you know.”
Alison had the sinister black bob and brows of a cabaret chanteuse. Beneath the impeccable lacquer of her makeup, she looked about ten years old.