Part 32: The Blancmange Horror

(I painted this in Procreate using the oil paint and turpentine brushes. - Chaiga T. Cheska)
~~~

Being an account of a pudding that would not take no for an answer, a junior librarian who briefly became one, a scholar of lichen whose patients were ordinarily ducks, and a Library that frightened itself so thoroughly in the night that it built us a galaxy to hide behind.

Compiled by Bramwell Corin, who spent the better part of one afternoon on his hands and knees and would like it noted that none of it was his idea, apart from the parts that were.

Bramwell’s Account

It began, as a surprising number of things in this building begin, with the Victorians of planet Earth.

The Library had gone on reading about them in the evenings, and somewhere between the bustle and the mourning brooch it had wandered out of the fashion section and into the kitchen, where, trembling on a cut-glass stand like a debutante told to stand up straight, it had discovered blancmange.

Since the nebula cake, the Library had understood that it could make edible things, and the discovery had gone to its head a little, like a first bicycle. That morning, we found the staff room table laid with six glass bowls, each holding a blancmange no Victorian had ever set in a mould.

One was the deep violet of the Restricted Section’s nebula, with faint lightning moving in it. One was the green of the inside of a shell, with small cold stars suspended in it like seeds in jam. All of them wobbled, the blancmange, not the staff.

Beside the teapot lay a book. “A Tasting, For My Staff, Who Are Allowed Seconds.” I have not refused a pudding since I was young, and I did not intend to begin with one made by a sentient building. The violet tasted of blackcurrant and, beneath that, of a thunderstorm watched from a warm room. Thaddeus tried the green one and wrote something at great speed. Mistress Spine took one measured spoonful, considered it, and took another, which from Mistress Spine is a standing ovation. Lyria danced a verdict of rippling wrists and hands, which I translated as cool water in a hot garden. The falling stars on the ceiling came down thicker and faster.

Pip stood in the doorway with his hands in his waistcoat pockets and did not come in. He looked at the bowls the way one looks at a dog one has been told is friendly but is perhaps not.

“It’s rather good, actually,” I said, thinking my younger colleague might be feeling unsure about puddings made by ceiling nebulae.

“No, thank you,” said Pip, with a half-suppressed look of disgust on his face.

A book dropped onto the table in front of him and turned itself so the title faced him. “Why Not?”

Pip’s Account

Because blancmange is DISGUSTING, that’s why not!!! I said it to the whole room, and I’ll say it again here. It SWEATS at you. It sits in the bowl all shiny and suspicious like it’s waiting for you to turn your back. It’s not jelly, and it’s not custard; it’s an IMPOSTOR that turns up at birthday parties pretending to be a treat. Everyone else can have as much as they like. I have no interest in the stuff.

Bramwell’s Account

The Library did not care for Pip’s reaction at all.

Down came a determined shower of books, all on Pip. “Blancmange: Versatile, Economical, and Suitable for Everyone.” “Pink Is a Perfectly Good Colour for Puddings.” And a crumbling brown volume revealing that blancmange had begun life, centuries ago, as a dish of chicken and almonds. I put that one face down under the teapot. Some arguments are not helped by history.

Pip read every title, then folded his arms. “It’s still not for me. I don’t have to like it. That is allowed, you know!”

And he went off to reshelve with the stiff dignity of a small cat leaving a room it has been laughed at in. For some hours, the Library was incredibly quiet, and I made the mistake, which I have made before, of taking quiet for peace.

Mid-afternoon, a book landed on Pip up the library steps. He caught it without looking and read it aloud. “But What Is Wrong with Blancmange?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Pip, to the ceiling. “I just don’t like it. It wobbles in the dish. It’s cold and damp, and it’s the colour of a sunburnt knee. Why won’t you believe me?”

“I Will Help You Like It.”

“I don’t need help. I know I absolutely don’t like it. It’s disgusting.”

A pause, as though a great many shelves were drawing breath at once. Then a heavier book landed at Pip’s feet.

“Blancmange Is Wonderful and Should Be Shared with Everybody, Including Small Librarians.”

Pip put it on the trolley, face down. “I’ve got shelving to do. I’m not talking about pudding anymore. This is stupid.”

The stars over Natural History went out one by one, like windows in a street at bedtime. Pip saw it, and I saw him understand that the word “stupid” had been a bad choice. But he is nineteen and had his pride, and he turned his back and went on shelving.

Over the staff room, though nobody noticed, the falling stars had stopped falling. The whole ceiling had turned a flat, sulking pink.

At four o’clock it was Pip’s turn to make the tea. I heard him shuffling towards the staff room, stuffing a collection of bookmarks into one of his pockets, his mind still clearly on his earlier work.

And then I heard a sound I hope never to hear again: a vast, wet, slithering gloop, like a cow stepping out of a bog, a gasp of surprise, and then a series of soft, heavy slaps, and then a silence so complete that I could hear the clock.

I put down my pen and went to look.

There was a shape in the doorway, roughly Pip’s height and a good deal wider, pink from top to bottom and gleaming faintly, and it was dripping, slowly, as syrup drips from a spoon. Where the drips landed, they sat on the boards and trembled. On the floor beside it lay Pip’s top hat, upside down, with a dollop of blancmange in the crown like fruit in a bowl.

“Hello?” I said. “Pip, are you in there?”

For a long moment, nothing. Then slowly, one after the other, Pip’s eyes opened. A hand rose out of the pink and wiped across his eyes, and again, and the rest of him began to emerge the way a stone appears when the tide goes out.

His hair was plastered flat to his head. His jacket and waistcoat were saturated and hung off him like washing left out in a gale. He was shivering, and he looked down at himself, arms held away from his sides, pink running off the ends of his fingers, with such complete revulsion that I felt it in my own stomach. He tried to wipe it off his sleeves and only spread it.

“You’re completely covered,” I said, since somebody had to. “Head to foot.”

“Thank you, Bramwell,” said Pip, through chattering teeth. “Obviously!”

He flicked one hand, and a dollop struck the door frame, barely missing me by a hair, which I found a tad concerning. “It’s everywhere. It’s down my collar. It’s in my boots. It’s in my EARS, Bramwell. It’s sooooo cold and disgusting!”

I did feel slightly sorry for him, though I was also trying very hard not to laugh. But a boy made of blancmange poses a threat to our many collections of books, so I felt action should be taken at once. I stepped carefully past him and fetched the squeegee we use on the windows when the condensation is bad.

I started at his shoulders, scraping the worst of it so that more of my colleague was revealed. The blancmange came away in long pink sheets and slapped to the floor in a ring around his feet, and Pip stood with his eyes shut and his arms out like a scarecrow, saying nothing, which was worse than anything he might have said.

When I had done what I could, I handed him his hat.

“Straight up to the shower room,” I said. “And do try not to get too much of it on the Library between here and there.”

Pip glared at me. “How am I supposed to do that? I’m dripping everywhere!”

“Tiptoe,” I suggested.

He did not tiptoe. He went squelching off across the reading room and up the back stairs, leaving a line of soggy pink footprints, and I heard him the whole way, muttering:

“This is soooo unfair! Why is it always me? Even more disgusting to wear than to eat…..I’m never touching anything that even looks like blancmange ever, don’t even care if it’s the last pudding in MirMarnia!”

Thaddeus and I cleared the doorway and tipped the remains into the sink, where the blobs lay quivering, and left them to finish being disgusting on their own. We had only just straightened up when Mistress Spine came out of her office.

“Bramwell. There are pink footprints the length of the reading room and up the back stairs. I suspect Pip. Where is he?”

I explained that the Library had poured a great deal of blancmange onto our junior colleague, and that Pip was upstairs trying to stop looking like a pudding.

She listened without a flicker. “I see. Keep me informed. And clean up these footprints, please. They’ll go sticky. I can’t stand having sticky floors!”

So I cleaned the footprints, on my hands and knees, with a damp cloth, all the way up to the shower room door, behind which I could hear the water running and Pip, still faintly, muttering.

Thaddeus’s Reflections

Pip said right after being covered in pudding, “Thaddeus, if this was you, I will never forgive you.” It was not me. I pinned him a note on his desk to say so. I am secretly pleased that he thought it was me.

Bramwell’s Account

I came downstairs with my knees aching and my patience much reduced, and addressed the ceiling and the Library in general.

“Now look here. If you’re going to do that every time someone doesn’t care for a foodstuff, we shall have a very messy Library, and I shall be the one cleaning it. We don’t want that, do we? People are allowed not to like things. Even things you like. Even things you’ve made. That’s perfectly all right, and we should leave it at that.”

The pink over the staff room flickered. Two books came down, much more gently than before.

“I Thought It Would Help”.

And, smaller: “There Must Be a Reason he doesn’t like Blancmange”.

It was still offended, but I thought it had begun to wonder whether it had gone too far.

“Well,” I said, half to myself, “I suppose it is rather interesting. Why Pip dislikes a pudding so much. There probably is a reason.”

The ceiling lit up like a fairground, and down came the books: “The Mesmerist’s Companion”; “Trance, Suggestion, and the Hidden Rooms of the Mind”; and a thin volume with a cheerful yellow cover, “How to Hypnotise a Young Librarian in Twelve Easy Steps”.

I was on step four of the latter when Mistress Spine came past to refill her coffee, looked over my shoulder, and stopped.

“Bramwell. What is that?”

I told her. She set down her cup. “Very well. Perhaps there is some reason the boy can’t abide the stuff. But you have never hypnotised anyone in your life, and if you go poking about in his head with a yellow paperback, heaven knows what you’ll find or what you’ll leave behind. We have a scholar asleep in the east attic. Professor Mudd. He stayed on after last night’s lecture overran, as there was nobody to take him home. His curriculum vitae lists hypnotism under Additional Skills. Go and ask him for assistance.”

Since our adventures in Trowley Bottom the week before, the Library has ventured this week in a different clearing deep in old dark woodland, and in the damp it had grown a frill of lichen on the smallest toe of its left hind foot. Six scholars had come to discuss it and gone home without a conclusion, all except Professor I. C. Mudd, the foremost authority on lichens that grow on the toes of sentient buildings, a round, pink, cheerful man with white hair that stood up at the back like a duckling’s feathers. He was sitting on the end of his bed eating toast when I knocked, and I told him everything.

“Ah,” he said, putting down the toast. “Yes, I should think I could help. I have hypnotised a great many ducks.”

“Ducks,” I said, struggling to understand the connection to what I’d just shared.

“Ducks traumatised by dirty pond water. They go off their bread.” He considered me over his spectacles. “I have met your young Pip. He is quite a small person. Rather nearer the size of a duck than you are. I don’t imagine the principle is very different.”

I had no answer to that. He said he would be down directly, once he had found his pendulum and a fresh cup of tea.

Bramwell’s Account (continued)

Under the Professor’s direction, Thaddeus and I made up the comfy reading room. He wanted the deepest armchair, the green one with the tall wing back and a proper headrest, turned towards the fire. We brought a footstool, a great many cushions and two blankets, and drew the curtains halfway, and the Library, watching with great interest, turned the ceiling above the chair to a gentle dusk.

That was how Pip found us.

He came in washed and dressed, hair still damp, and looked at the chair and the two of us standing beside it like undertakers.

“What’s going on?”

“The Professor from last night,” I said, “is going to hypnotise you. To find out why you hate blancmange so much.”

Pip rolled his eyes so far back I could only see the whites, and shook his head. “No. No, thank you. I want nothing to do with this.” And he turned for the door.

I reached out and snagged his arm, and steered him round to the green chair, and pressed him down into it with a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s only a small thing,” I said. “A few minutes. All you have to do is sit here and be hypnotised. It might be quite nice, actually.”

“Quite nice?” He pushed me aside and was up and making for the door before I had my balance back.

Across the room, Thaddeus gave me one short, urgent nod. He had a note in his other hand, and I briefly glimpsed it and read that the Professor’s waggon would be here within the hour, and we didn’t have time for this.

I surged forward in a most unprofessional manner, and caught Pip two steps from the door, took him round the middle, and hauled him bodily back across the rug, heels skidding, and put him in the green chair and sat myself on a chair beside him, blocking any further escapes. Thaddeus came round and sat, very deliberately, on the other side.

Pip looked at me, then at Thaddeus, and arrived at the fact that he had been trapped, on purpose, by his own colleagues. He sat bolt upright among the cushions, rigid as a poker, arms crossed tight and a face like thunder, which worried me that he might retaliate in ways I didn’t want to imagine and tried not to think about.

That was when the Professor came in, sipping his tea.

He saw what I suppose he had seen on a great many riverbanks: a nervous patient. He set his cup on the mantelpiece, drew up a low chair opposite Pip, knee to knee, and smiled.

“Now then. Nothing to worry about. I can tell you that every single duck I have ever hypnotised has been very calm afterwards. Very calm indeed.”

I watched the word duck go into Pip and not come out again. He looked baffled, then genuinely alarmed, and then he was scrambling for the edge of the chair.

Thaddeus put one strong hand on his shoulder and held him there.

“There, there,” said the Professor, drawing out a small brass pendulum. “Just watch this for me.”

“This won’t work,” said Pip. “I can’t be hypnotised. I’m not the sort. You’re wasting your time.”

“Of course,” said the Professor, swinging it. “Just watch.”

“I’m only watching so you’ll see it doesn’t...”

He did not finish as his words faded away.

I have never seen anyone go under so fast. His eyes followed the pendulum once across and once back. His arms loosened. Within seconds his shoulders dropped like a tent when the pole is pulled, and he went limp in Thaddeus’s grip, head lolling, as though every string in him had been cut at once.

Thaddeus caught him and, the way one lays down a sleeping cat, lowered him back into the cushions until his head rested against the back of the chair. The Professor went on talking, low and slow, about a long flight of steps, going down one at a time.

Thaddeus and I looked at each other in amazement. That was fast, said Thaddeus’s face.

From the Case Notes of Professor I. C. Mudd

Subject: P. Thimble, junior librarian. Compact. Highly reactive. Initial resistance comparable to a Mallard drake, though with less biting. Induction achieved in seconds, which I attribute in part to the quality of the cushions. Note for future sessions: always request cushions.

Bramwell’s Account

“Now, Pip,” said the Professor, “I want you to go back. Back and back, to the very first time you ever met the pudding called blancmange. You’re there now. Tell me what’s happening.”

A dreamy look crossed Pip’s face, the look of someone standing in a room from long ago. When he spoke, it was in the high, careful voice of a boy of about five.

“I’m at a birthday party. My very best friend is sitting across from me. He’s small, like me. We’re so small our noses only just come over the top of the table. There are big hands. Grown-up hands. I can’t see the grown-ups, just their hands, coming down with bowls. There’s cake in mine, and red jelly, and a pink thing. It’s shiny. It’s sweating.”

Thaddeus shifted and watched Pip intently, probably expecting a reaction.

“My friend looks at his bowl,” said the small voice, “and he sees the pudding and bursts into tears as soon as he sees the pink thing. So I’m not going to eat mine. If it makes him cry, it isn’t good. It’s a bad pudding. So I don’t eat any of it. Not the cake or the jelly either, because they’re touching it.”

I felt, I confess, rather let down. I had braced myself for some dreadful early wound, and here was only a loyal little boy and a crying friend.

“Very good. And now a little further, Pip. A little deeper. What is it, really, that puts you off this pink pudding?”

Pip’s face frowned as if in worry. He turned his head on the cushions, one way and the other, and his hands closed on the edges of the blanket, and he began to breathe fast and shallow. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no. Oh no, oh no.”

I looked at Thaddeus, and Thaddeus was already looking at me, and we had the same thought at once: what on earth have we done to him? For a pudding. I had half risen from my chair.

But the Professor leaned forward and laid a hand on Pip’s arm. “You’re safe. You’re quite safe, Pip. Now you’re going to tell us what you see. You won’t be frightened. You’ll just tell us, very clearly, so that we can see it too. You’re safe.”

Pip went still. His hands let go of the blanket. When he spoke again, it was the small voice still, but calm now, clear and flat, like a child reading out a list.

“It’s that night. After the party. I’m in bed and asleep and dreaming, and something comes out of nothing, out of the air, where there wasn’t anything before. It’s made of blancmange. All of it. It fills the room right up to the ceiling, and it’s pink, and it wobbles all the time, even when it isn’t moving. It sweats. Drips come off it all over and go plip on the floor. It hasn’t got a face, but it knows where I am. And it wants everything. The bed. The curtains. My shoes. Me. It wants to take everything into it until there’s only pink. It thinks that’s what it’s for. So I run, down the stairs, and it comes after me, and it doesn’t walk, it pours, and it gets bigger every time it swallows something, and it goes gloop, and...”

I will say, without shame, that the back of my neck had gone cold. The ceiling over the chair had gone a dark and uneasy rose. Thaddeus gave me a look that said, as plainly as any footnote, that if such a thing were real he would be concerned about it himself.

“Thank you, Pip,” said the Professor gently. “That’s quite enough. Now listen to me. From now on you are not afraid of blancmange, or any pudding at all. And if you don’t want to eat it, you need never eat it. That’s quite all right. When I count to ten you’ll wake feeling rested and easy, and go back to your work, and blancmange won’t trouble you again. One. Two...”

At ten he snapped his fingers.

Pip opened his eyes, and his whole face was as smooth as a pond on a still morning. “Oh,” he said, in his own voice. “Oh, that was lovely. I feel soooo relaxed. I should be hypnotised more often.” He blinked at me. “Can I go back to my shelving now?”

I nodded, unable to think how to reply, and Pip rose, stretched like a cat in a patch of sun, and wandered out, humming.

“Well,” said the Professor, finding his tea cold. “That’s about all I can do. Leave it be, I should say, and see what happens.”

Twenty minutes later his waggon came, crammed with scholars in robes, and he was hauled aboard with his cloak half on, and they went off at a gallop between the dark trees.

Pip shelved books, perfectly pleasant for the rest of the afternoon, which I considered a bonus. None of us gave a thought to the Library.

The Wandering Library had been listening, of course. It had heard every word of that small, flat voice. And it has the mind of an eleven-year-old, twelve at a stretch, and until that morning it had never heard of blancmange.

Pip’s Account

I don’t know why everyone made such a FUSS. I had a lovely little nap in the green chair. I remember the blancmange monster, but honestly it wasn’t THAT scary. I was five. Also, I want it on record that I was KIDNAPPED by my own colleagues, one of whom GRABBED ME AND HAULED ME AND TRAPPED ME IN THE CHAIR, and I haven’t forgotten, even if I am very relaxed about it.

Bramwell’s Account

We began to close up a little after dusk. Lamps went down, and curtains drawn over the tall windows. Pip pushed his desk drawers shut with his hip, then came over to my desk and set down three pencils and my good fountain pen.

“I wondered where those had gone,” I said, feeling slightly affronted after spending the better part of the afternoon wondering whether I was losing my mind and my writing implements.

“I only borrowed them. Don’t be so fussy.”

“That pen was in my inside pocket.”

“It was sticking out of your inside pocket,” said Pip, as though that settled it.

Thaddeus tucked Barnaby into his waistcoat pocket with a corner of a digestive biscuit, and Barnaby sat up with the bright look of a hamster anticipating an evening of scuffling.

And then the whole Library around us shuddered.

It came up through the floor like a wave through a boat, and we staggered into one another and put out our hands to the wall. Every book on every shelf rattled once, like teeth.

Mistress Spine’s door flew open, and she came out with one hand on the frame and her hair very slightly less perfect than usual, having plainly just been thrown against a bookcase. “What was that? What is happening?”

We ran to the windows. The woods stood black and still, and there was no moon.

I looked up. The stars had gone. What hung over the reading room was a low, uneasy cloud the pink of a bruise, with dark edges that crept.

“What’s the matter?” I said to the Library. “Are you all right?”

Three small grey books fell into my hands, so gently I barely felt them.

“Concerning the Manifestation of Blancmange in the Main Reading Room Whilst Everyone Is Asleep”.

And….

“Must Everybody Go to Sleep?”

Also….

“Why Must People Sleep at Night at All? Could You Not Sleep Down Here?”

Thaddeus wrote a single line, tore it off, and pinned it to the panelling beside the fireplace. What are you afraid of?

The answer landed on his head as a tiny leatherbound book. “It Might Manifest”.

We all looked at Pip. I watched the afternoon come back to him.

“Oh no,” he said. “The Library was listening. But it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. I was five.” And then, more quietly, as it came to him: “Oh, well, I suppose the Library is a child, technically, isn’t it?”

Mistress Spine made the kind of decision for which she is justly feared.

“Right. I am going to bed. The three of you will stay down here tonight, in the main room, so that it is not empty. Fetch your bedding. Have a sleepover. You can tell me all about it in the morning.”

And she went upstairs.

“How,” said Pip, “did we just get recruited?”

Nobody had an answer. We fetched our bedding.

Thaddeus’s Reflections

I chose the entrance hall, where I could see the front doors, the length of the reading room, and if I turned I could see Bramwell across the room in the hallway door.

Pip began in the very centre of the reading room, sitting up in his blanket like a small, cross owl, turning his head from one of us to the other. He wanted his own bed in the attic. He did not need to say so, it being written on his face.

Bramwell’s Account

I made my bed across the doorway between the hall and the reading room, so I could see down the corridor one way and over the whole room the other, and sat up against the door frame with a candle.

There happened to be a book on the shelf beside my head, as there always is. “Monsters, Actual and Otherwise: A Field Guide for the Anxious Reader”.

I read aloud to the ceiling that a monster of the imagination, however vividly it wobbles, has no substance beyond the mind that made it, and can no more step out of a dream than a picture can step out of its frame. That the blancmange creature was something a little boy had made up one night, a long time ago, after a party, and there was nothing whatever in it to be afraid of.

The nebula above me lightened a shade. Encouraged, I turned the page.

“On the other hand,” I read, “there are true creatures. And in old woodland such as this, the one to be mindful of is the Hollow Walker.”

I should have stopped there.

I read that it was older than the woods it walks in, shaped like a wolf and like the memory of one, drawn to magic as a moth to a lamp; and that on certain nights it can be heard howling, like wind in a chimney that has learnt to grieve.

“So we shan’t be going outside at night,” I said. “Not whilst we’re parked here. We might hear it howl, of course, which some of us might find...”

I looked across at Pip. He was looking back at me with eyes as round as saucers and his blanket pulled up to his chin, plainly wondering why he had ever listened to a word I said.

I looked at Thaddeus. Thaddeus wore the face of a man watching somebody put out a small fire with a larger one. Really? said the face. Look at him.

I closed the book and addressed the ceiling nebula. “Do you understand the difference now? Between the made-up creature and the real one?”

A single book landed on my blanket. “Yes. I Understand. Give Me a Minute”.

None of us knew what that meant.

There was a scuffle of blankets. Pip had shuffled his entire bedding, himself inside it, to a spot exactly between Thaddeus and me.

And then the ceiling began to move.

The ceiling galaxies in the library drew back like a curtain, and the stars came out all together, and the nebulae with them, violet and shell-green and rose-gold, wheeling overhead like a millpond stirred with an oar. The colour ran down the walls and poured into the tall windows, until where the black woods had been there was only turning colour, sweeping like weed in a river.

And then it went out, through the glass, the way breath goes out into cold air. It rolled across the clearing, pushing the dark back as a tide pushes back sand, until it reached the first of the great trees and rose there all the way round us, a slow shining dome of nebula, higher than the Library’s roof. Whatever might have been stepping softly between the trunks was on the far side of it now, and could not come through, and we knew it as surely as we knew our own names.

The nearest I can come to how it felt is this: it was like being small and ill in bed, hearing the rain, and knowing that somebody downstairs has banked up the fire and is sitting up with a book, and will be there all night. Pip’s shoulders came down from round his ears. Thaddeus, who does not lean on things, leaned back against the door. We were in a sanctuary, and the Library had made it, out of its own galaxies, for us.

There was a step behind me. I shifted my bedding, and Mistress Spine came through in her dark blue dressing gown, hair in a plait, a finger in her book to keep the place. She turned slowly all the way round, then looked at the three of us.

“How,” she said, “did you get it to do this?”

Pip opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He is still somewhat afraid of Mistress Spine, particularly in a dressing gown.

Thaddeus crossed the room in four strides and pinned a folded note to the side of her head, just above her ear. Sometimes he is a ridiculous man.

She peeled it off and read it, and when she reached the part about my reading aloud on the Hollow Walker, she looked at me over the top of the paper, rolled her eyes, and said under her breath, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bramwell, because that was helpful.” Her gaze went to Pip, pale and wide-eyed in his blanket, and softened her gaze very slightly, and returned to the note.

She read to the end, and looked out at the wall of light for a long moment. “Do you know why those scholars were here last night? It was only partly the Libraries lichen covered toe. I had asked them to find some way to put a protection around this building when we travel through places like where we are now. With no warriors or ways to protect ourselves and with just a hamster, a chicken and a great many books, it has been a worry. Six fine minds sat at that table last night, as you know, and could not tell me how to create protection.” She turned her face up to the ceiling, and her voice changed. “But you’ve done it. All on your own. Well done, Library.”

A small bright meteor went across the ceiling from end to end, like a smile.

Then she turned to me, and the moment was over. “Right, Bramwell. You’ll need to make a note of all this.”

“It’s the middle of the night.” I pointed this out, as she seemed to have forgotten.

“It has just happened,” said Mistress Spine. “It will never be fresher than it is now. It must be documented… You can all sleep in tomorrow by an hour if needed.”

So we went to our desks in our blankets, beneath a ceiling full of wheeling stars, with the dark held off beyond the windows, and we wrote this report that you are reading now.

It goes to the scholars in the morning, with a sample of lichen from the Library’s toe, so that they may learn what more there is to learn about a building still very young, and growing up faster than any of us expected.

Mistress Spine’s Account

The shield held until first light and withdrew of its own accord at sunrise. Nothing crossed it.

Staff will resume duties at nine o’clock. Not before. They have earned it.

Blancmange is not to be served in this building again without the written agreement of all staff. This includes Pip, who needs to stop being afraid of me.

Pip’s Account

I would like it written down officially that I was right about blancmange ALL ALONG. It IS a monster. It just turned out to be a good one in the end, which is the most confusing thing that’s ever happened to me, and I work and live here.

The Library left a very small book on my pillow this morning. It said, “Sorry About The Blancmange Attack”. So I suppose we’re friends again.

I’m still not eating it, though, and I’m working on not being afraid of Mistress Spine, but don’t expect miracles overnight, please. This will take time.