A little fictional mini-vignette, to make up for the hard time I’ve been having posting.
Okay, so nobody believes me. That’s not my fault. Doesn’t mean I’m not telling the truth about Miss Ellsworth.
It was a great night for a dare. Perfect, really – with the moon all bright and full and turning the leaves on the ground all silvery except for the little pools of lamplight where the gold and the brown and the red still show through.
And the library’s always been one of my favorite places, anyway. I don’t know how it is that a place can be so big and so cozy all at once, but it’s the best place in town to be when you want somewhere to get out of the cold, or to sit and think, or maybe just to get out of the house when Dad’s in one of his moods.
At night sometimes you can see a light in the basement, or in the attic. Some of the other scouts say it’s ghosts. I’ve always figured Miss Ellsworth lived there.
So when Wally told me I was too chicken to sneak in that night…well.
It’s funny, really, how people stop noticing things once they get used to the way things are. All I had to do was settle in behind one of those great big dogs, or whatever they are, outside the front doors and wait. I watched as Mr. Johansen went home for the day, all tidy and brisk in that long tweed coat. I waited as Mrs. Ridley and Derek and whatever the new baby’s name is – was it Lewis? – headed off home to dinner, with Derek asking if they could do corned beef. They were the perfect distraction; I slipped inside just quickly enough that the baby’s fussing helped hide the sound of my shoes on the tile.
From there, all I had to do was duck past the front desk – no janitor, not just yet, not until everybody’s gone home – and down the EMPLOYEES ONLY stairs to the basement.
I’d never been down there, of course. It’s different from the rest of the library; darker, closer, a maze of boxes with labels I could read but not understand and sleek, unlabeled doors. Quieter, too – which seems crazy when you’re talking about a library, but it was, I promise it was. Heavy quiet. Spooky quiet. Quiet in a way that made it all feel a little like a dream.
That’s just it of course. Wally says of course it WAS a dream, that I must have fallen asleep somehow. That I couldn’t really have lost the stairs, that I couldn’t really have walked for hours and hours, until the beam of my flashlight started to fade right out.
I remember that awfully clearly for a dream though. How pale and yellow and flickery the beam was. How I could only just read through it the neat yellowed label on the box in the corner I was facing: 398.469 – Accession 01/17/87. Miss Ellsworth’s handwriting, all perfect, tidy circles and squares and…
And then there was a light up above me all of a sudden. Not an electric light, either; this one was orangey-yellow and flickering and all I could think was how much I wanted to get closer. I climbed up on the box without thinking about it, and then the one after that, and the one after that, and then there was a little window all of a sudden, and the little window looked in on a fine big room, and that seemed a little strange at the time, but I couldn’t really put my finger on why. I know now, of course. It was too big, much too big, so big I think you could have fit the whole first floor of the library inside.
But it was so pretty, you know? There were big leather chairs, and one of those rugs that looks like it ought to be a flying carpet really – maybe it was a flying carpet on vacation, I don’t know – and a grand fireplace that made you just want to stretch out in front of it like Wally’s cat Seamus and sleep for a week.
And the books. It was FULL of books. Shelves and piles and stacks and…buildings of books, old ones and new ones and big ones and small ones; huge leather books with gold lettering on them I couldn’t read, and at least one of those little paperbacks Mama reads, with the pretty ladies and the man without a shirt on the cover. (Always seems to be the same guy. I wonder why he never wears a shirt.)
I was just thinking how funny that paperback looked when I heard a door open, and Miss Ellsworth came in. Her hair was still up in that coppery knot at the back of her neck, but I guess she’d changed clothes for the night: a long white dress I’d never seen her in before, sort of sparkly in the firelight.
And…and then this is the part where everybody says I must’ve been dreaming. Miss Ellsworth walked over to the fireplace – I remember watching her dress sparkling in the light – and then…then she reached up and pulled out the long gold pin she uses to keep her hair up. There was all this shining coppery hair tumbling down everywhere – and as it did she…stretched.
Just like I do when I get up in the morning, arms straight out, all long and lean. But then she kept going. As I watched she seemed to get…longer, taller, broader, bigger: from under that long swirl of hair, still falling, there sprouted wings. The wings stretched up and out and OUT, and where there was hair there were shiny coppery scales.
And the stretch kept going. Kept going until her hands and feet had claws and a long sleek coppery tail was coiled around the base of one of those big leather chairs that suddenly didn’t seem so big any longer. Kept going until the face looking up at that ceiling grew long and coppery, too, framed by horns that swept and curled like music.
Then there was a sort of long slow rumbling breath out from deep inside her somewhere, and I knew what I was looking at.
Miss Ellsworth the librarian is a dragon.
And she knows I know.
I must have made a noise; shifted on the box or dropped my flashlight, or some damn thing. Darned thing, sorry. Mama says I shouldn’t talk like that.
But suddenly she was looking straight at me, and I knew she saw me.
Her eyes are green. Her real ones, I mean, not the ones she wears every day. Green like the forest in a fairy tale, too green to be real, so green I couldn’t look away, so green I couldn’t breathe.
And then it was morning, and I was on the long couch in the children’s reading room, and Mama was furious with me. And nobody believes me.
Bet they would if I were a boy.
Well. Maybe.
I still don’t know where my flashlight’s got to.