Matthew Skelton

Endymion Spring

Blake bent down to pick up the volume that had fallen to the floor, but then stopped. A ripple of anxiety passed through him. Was this the book that had attacked his finger?
  But that's impossible, he thought. Books don't do that. Besides, the cover of this book was chipped and cracked, scabbed like an old leather glove. It looked perfectly harmless.
He shook his head. He was just being silly.
  Quickly, before he could change his mind, he reached down and scooped up the volume. Then something else happened: the book realigned itself in his fingers - just slightly. The movement was barely noticeable, yet Blake was certain he had felt it. The book sat in his hand, a perfect fit, as though that was exactly where it belonged. 
  His heart skipped a beat.
  Looking closely, he could see that two small clasps, once holding the book together, had broken and the strips of leather hung down like unfastened watchstraps. A silver prong, like a snake's tooth, dangled from one of the bands. Obviously, it was this metal fang that had pricked his finger. His knuckle throbbed with the memory and he sucked on the wound, where another bead of blood was forming.  
  There was writing on the cover, too, but this had faded so that the title was barely visible. The words were as delicate as the strands of a spider web, and he blew on them softly to remove a fine layer of dust. A name or title, pressed into the leather in unusual rounded letters, appeared before his eyes:
  Endymion Spring
  He opened the book.
  His fingers were jittery, but even so the pages flickered of their own accord - as though an invisible hand had reached across time or space and was searching for the best place to begin.
  He held his breath, amazed.
  Some of the pages were stuck together, joined at the edges, unopened, while others unfolded like maps without obvious destinations. They reminded him of the origami birds he had once seen a Japanese lady making on television. There were no lines on the paper, unlike a notebook, and no sections to write in, unlike a diary; and yet there were no printed pages, so far as he could see, so it couldn't be a regular novel either. It was as if he had discovered a completely blank book. But what was a book without words doing in a library?
  A faint tingling sensation, like the suggestion of a breeze, tickled his fingertips and he moved closer to the window to inspect the book more thoroughly. He thought he could detect faint ridges glowing inside the paper, as though the sun were shining through it, communicating something; but when he held the pages up to the light, hoping to find a secret message encoded inside, he couldn't see anything. The pages were like thin, frosty panes of glass. Unreadable.
  Disappointed, he walked back to the shelf, stroking the paper absentmindedly. It felt softer than anything he had touched before. Like snowflakes before they melt, he thought - or, or, or what precisely? It was an elusive feeling, a sensation he couldn't quite grasp. Yet once he had opened the book, he didn't want to let go. It had cast its spell on him.
  Obviously, this wasn't an ordinary book at all!
  'What are you looking at?'
  Duck had surprised him by sneaking down from the gallery upstairs. She clung, monkey-like, to the edge of a bookcase and studied him with a curious expression.    
  'Nothing,' he said, and abruptly turned his back so she couldn't see.
  'You're lying.' 
  'I told you, it's nothing.'
  'Since when do you like reading?'
  'I don't, so go away.' 
  Duck rummaged through some of the other books on the shelf. She selected a few of the fatter volumes and took them to a desk, where she skimmed through them.  
  'Typography?' she asked, wrinkling her nose. 'Since when have you been interested in that?'
  She showed him the frontispiece of the first book she had chosen: DE ORTU ET PROGRESSU ARTIS TYPOGRAPHICAE. An illustration beneath the title portrayed a group of men in a vaulted chamber full of heavy machinery and sloping desks. They were printing books.
  'I'm not,' he said. 'This book's different. It was just in the wrong section, that's all.'
  'What's it about?'
  He ignored her and continued leafing through the volume. It's as if I'm the first person to have discovered it, he thought; or else it's the first book to have discovered me . . .

Endymion Spring © Matthew Skelton, 2006. Published by Puffin Books.