Nobody warned me that the worst thing about Ashgrove would be how kind it was. The bus did not stop so much as arrive. One moment we were deep in the pines, the road a black ribbon between trunks as wide as doors. The next, the trees simply opened, and there below us, cupped in the palm of two hills, was a town. It was early evening, though I had left the city at seven that morning, and I did not stop to wonder about that. The sky was the colour of a bruise. And every street, every lane, every crooked rooftop below us was strung with lanterns. Thousands of them. Gold and amber and a deep trembling red, swaying a little on their wires, as if the whole town were breathing. Somebody behind me whispered, “Oh.” That was all anyone said. It is the only word for a moment like that, and it is not a big one. It was only when the bus swung round the last bend that I saw the lanterns were not empty. There was something alive in every one of them. A pinprick of ember no bigger than my thumb, with a small bright face, turning to watch us pass. Each flame leaned towards the bus windows like a child at a school gate. “Wicks,” murmured the old woman, still without opening her eyes. “They like new faces. Try not to lie in front of them.” The boy who had been crying was pressed against the window with his mouth open. The lantern light slid across his face, and he looked, for the first time, his age. “It’s real,” he said, to nobody. “It’s actually real.” “Nothing is ever only real, dear,” said the old woman across the aisle. “That’s the trouble.” I thought she was being gloomy. I remember being faintly annoyed with her. That tells you how much I understood. The bus let us off in a square of round, worn stones. In the middle stood a fountain with no water in it, only a stone bird with its wings half open, caught in the act of leaving. Around the square the buildings leaned together like old friends sharing a secret: a bakery, a bookbinder’s, a shop that sold nothing but clocks, a tavern whose sign said THE LAST ORDER in peeling gold. And there were people. That was what I had not expected. I had pictured a ghost town with its lights left on. Instead the square was alive. Couples strolled arm in arm. A man in a velvet coat juggled three glass spheres that glowed faintly from inside. A little girl in a patched witch’s hat, a real one, soft with age, chased a cat across the stones while someone called after her in a language I did not know and somehow understood. Every one of them was smiling. Not the tight polite smile of the city, the one you wear on the bus to say please don’t talk to me. An easy smile. A smile that said you are welcome here and you don’t have to explain. Something in my chest loosened that had been clenched since March. “Miss Kessler?” A woman was standing beside me, so close I should have heard her come. She was tall and slim, perhaps forty, perhaps four hundred, with dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck and a long coat the green of deep pine. A ring of iron keys hung at her hip. Her eyes were pale, nearly silver in the lantern light, and she looked at me with a gentle, total attention I had not had from anyone in months. “Calla Rue,” she said. “I keep the door. Welcome to Ashgrove.” “Thank you. I’m sorry, I don’t actually know why I’m here.” “Nobody does at first.” She smiled, and it reached her eyes. “That is rather the point. Come. You must be frozen, and your room has been waiting since the spring.” Since the spring. I opened my mouth to ask. But the boy from the bus had stumbled up behind us, and the girl with the rucksack and the red hair was at his elbow, still holding her bag of crisps, and he blurted, “Sorry, can I ask about the, what do they call them, the gifts?” Calla turned her silver gaze on him, and I lost my chance. “Tomorrow,” she said, kindly. “Tonight, you rest. Ashgrove is generous, but it is not hasty. Nothing worth having is given on the first night.” I see now that it was a warning. It was delivered so warmly that none of us heard it. My room was at the top of a narrow house on Tallow Street. The stairs creaked in a friendly way. The door was painted deep green, and when Calla pushed it open, I actually stepped back. It was mine. I do not mean it was nice, though it was: a sloped ceiling, a bed heaped with quilts, a window seat looking out over the glowing roofs, a small fire already going in the grate. I mean it was mine the way a room is yours when someone who knew you perfectly has arranged it. On the nightstand stood a tin of the tea my mother drank, the cheap, strong, slightly bitter one nobody else could stand. Beside it lay a pair of knitted slippers in my size. On the shelf was a row of paperbacks, every one a book I had loved and lost along the way. My hands had started to shake. “How,” I began. “The Season knows what you need,” said Calla, as simply as if she were giving me the time. “It always has. Eat something. Sleep. Come down when the bells ring.” She was gone before I thought to ask which bells. I sat on the bed with my mother’s scarf in my lap and the tea tin in my hands, and for a while I just looked at the fire. I promised myself I would be honest in this account, even where it makes me look foolish, so here it is. I felt chosen. I had not been chosen for anything since I was nine and picked second to last for rounders. Since then I had learned to be useful and quiet and easy to overlook. And now a whole glowing impossible town had laid a fire for me and put my mother’s tea by the bed. I cried then. Properly, with my face in the scarf, the way I had not let myself cry at the funeral. When it was over I felt scoured and light, like a window after rain. That is how it gets you. Not with fear. With relief. The bells rang at ten, deep and slow, from every direction at once. I felt them in the floorboards before I heard them in the air. Tallow Street was crowded. Everyone was walking the same way, unhurried, towards a hill at the heart of the town, where a long building stood with its tall windows blazing. The old woman from the bus was there, leaning on a stick, her mouth set in a hard line. The boy had acquired a scarf and a friend, the red-haired girl, who was laughing a little too loudly at everything he said, and he was glowing, and I was glad for him. The building was a library. I knew it from the smell before I was through the door: paper and dust and polish and old rain. Shelves climbed four storeys, lit by lanterns hung from the rafters on chains. Ladders on brass rails. Reading tables the length of boats. Somewhere above, a clock ticked at a stately pace, and under the ticking was a hush so deep it felt like being held. “The Library of Ashgrove,” said a voice at my elbow. “It never closes. It has never wished to.” I looked up, because something in the rafters had moved. The great beams of the ceiling were hung with bats. Hundreds of them, in long tight rows, wings folded round their bodies like small black umbrellas, so still that I had taken them for part of the woodwork. A few had unfolded one wing. Every tiny, wrinkled, mouse-eared face was turned down towards the room. “The night staff,” said the voice at my elbow. “Pipistrelles. Don’t stare, they don’t like it.” The man beside me looked about thirty. Tired, kind eyes, ink on his fingers, the rumpled air of someone who has fallen asleep over a book and woken up pleased about it. “Elliot Marsh,” he said, and held out a hand. “Archivist. Or something like it. I’ve been here a good while.” “Mira.” “I know.” He said it gently, almost apologetically. “They put the names up in the front hall. Look.” He pointed. A vast slate hung on the far wall, taller than a man and wider than a door, and chalked across it in a flowing hand were names. Hundreds of them. Mine was near the bottom, still wet. Mira Kessler. Above it, column after column, up the slate and out of sight into the shadows of the ceiling, were all the others. Names, and years beside them. 2019. 2004. 1987. 1951. 1920. I frowned. “These are previous years? People who came before?” “Yes.” “Did they all go home?” Elliot looked at me a beat too long. Then he smiled, and it was a good smile, and it did not reach the part of his face that mattered. “Come and see the Gifts,” he said. “They’ll tell you better than I can.” In the middle of the great reading room stood a long table of dark wood, and on it, laid out like instruments on a surgeon’s tray, were four sealed envelopes. Each was the same deep wine as the card. Each bore one word in gold. MEMORY. THE HUSH. FORESIGHT. BELONGING. Calla stood at the head of the table, keys gleaming. When she raised her hand the whole room went quiet, the way a pond goes still. “Friends. You were brought here because you were looking. Some of you were looking for a way to keep what you loved. Some, for a way to be heard. Some, to see the road ahead. And some, I think, simply for a place to be.” My heart gave one hard beat. “Ashgrove has a gift for each of you. Not a prize. Not a trick. A true gift, freely given, and entirely yours. You will choose at the Turning, two nights from now. Until then you are our guests. Explore. Eat. Dance. Do not be afraid. But I ask one thing.” Her silver eyes moved over the crowd and rested, briefly, on me. “Choose slowly.” The room let out its breath. Somebody laughed, nervously, and then everyone did. A fiddle started up somewhere, and a drum, and the crowd drifted towards the long windows and the terrace beyond. I stayed where I was. I was looking at a row of old framed photographs on the wall beside the slate, because something in one of them had caught my eye. A group portrait, brown and faded, the sort taken with a stiff row of people on the library steps. The caption said Ashgrove Residents, Autumn 1962. About twenty faces. Most of them I did not know. But in the back row, third from the left, stood a woman in a long coat the colour of deep pine, with a ring of iron keys at her hip and pale, silvery eyes that looked straight out of the photograph and into mine. She had not aged a day. “Mira?” said Elliot, close to my ear. His voice had gone quiet and careful. “Whatever you’ve just thought, don’t say it aloud. Not in here.” I turned. He was no longer smiling. “The library listens,” he said. “Come outside. I’ll tell you what I can.”
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