Scientists have proven that reading fiction makes people more empathic, improves their disposition and emotional intelligence. People, in other words, need stories. But stories also need people. An unread book is a caged animal, trapped between paper walls. They want reading, need it. To open a book is to set a story free.
In a bookstore at night—or a library or a box of books left in thedonation bin outside of your local Goodwill—you can feel the stories working their soft magic, singing a siren’s song to draw readers to their pages.
Read me and I’ll show you what passion looks like on paper…
Read me and breathe the rusted red air of Mars…
Read me and I’ll reveal to you what really happened in that lonely cabin in the dark, dark woods…
Read me, for you think you’re too old for unicorns and fairies, but in my pages, you’ll learn you are a mere baby in the eyes of these ancient beings, and don’t you want to feel like a child again?
Read me and remember…
Read me and forget…
Read me and hate…
Read me and fall in love…
Read me and learn the secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself…
When Duke, Koshka, and I reached Words, Words, Words at four in the morning, the air was heavy with this magic. Most people can’t feel it directly. They simply wake up with an overpowering urge to go to the nearest bookstore and buy a new novel. But to a Book Witch, the spell is impossible to ignore. It surrounded the building like a heavy fog.
“The Burners and I agree on one thing only,” I said, as the strange mist reached out toward us with tendrils of longing. “Books are dangerous.”
Duke smiled and said, “I like a spot of danger myself.”
We stood by my car, which I’d had to leave there earlier that evening when it wouldn’t start. If anyone caught us, we had our lie ready, that we’d come back to retrieve my Sun Buggy.
“Are you all right, darling?” Duke asked.
I shivered in the cold. Koshka pressed his small body to my legs. He let me pick him up and tuck him inside my coat.
“The books are particularly wild tonight,” I said. “Can you tell?”
He peered at the bookstore, shook his head no.
“Looks like a perfectly normal bookshop at night to me. A normalbookshop in an old, creaking Victorian house shrouded in fog and mist…”
“Books that don’t have a home yet are always trying to seduce you,” I explained. “That’s why almost no one can go into a bookstore without buying something. At night, the books try to get into your head, into your dreams. For a Book Witch, it’s like walking through a circus of ghosts…and they want me to run away and join their circus.”
Duke stared at me agog. “A ghost circus? That…that is positively sinister, Rainy. I’m going to have nightmares now.”
“It’s not too bad. Unless you’re in the horror section. Then it gets a little nightmarish. But it will be all right once I get my umbrella back. It’ll shield me. Until then, stick close.”
“Why don’t you let me go it alone?” Duke asked. “I can nick your umbrella and bring it back to you.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “If Dr. Fanshawe notices it’s gone, she’ll know I stole it. We need to get in, use it while we’re there, then put it back before morning.”
“Noted,” Duke said. “Penny said the back door was unlocked?”
“She said she thought she might have left it unlocked,” I told him. “Do you have the book?”
“What book?” Duke asked.
“Alice in Wonderland.”
“I thought you had it,” he said.
