‘Fine,’ Alice said distantly. ‘All right.’

‘By the by, the moisture on the seeker’s skin is its own secretion. There’s no need to keep it wet.’

‘That’s . . . good to hear.’

Chapter Twelve: Ending

CHAPTER TWELVE

ENDING

I’m walking a leech, Alice thought. I’ve got a leech on a leash. She had to suppress mad giggles.

The ‘seeker’ gave a steady pull on the leash, like an eager puppy, and Alice let it go where it liked. Ashes followed, trotting along the bookshelves and occasionally gathering himself for a leap from one to the next.

‘Did you know all that?’ Alice asked him. ‘About the books and scraps of magic and so forth?’

‘Mother may have mentioned it once or twice,’ the cat said, ‘but I wasn’t really paying attention. It doesn’t make much difference to me. Not my job description, you might say.’

‘What is your job description? Aside from taking care of me.’

‘Keeping things out of the library that ought not to be in it.’

Alice chuckled. ‘No wonder Geryon was angry with you.’

‘Yes. Well.’ Ashes bristled and lashed his tail for a moment. ‘It’ll teach me to have a sense of humour.’

They walked for a few moments in silence.

‘Where did this thing come from, anyway?’ Alice said, nodding towards the seeker. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like it.’

‘It came out of a book, of course,’ Ashes said. ‘From another world.’

‘Another world? Like another planet?’

‘Maybe. Who knows? You saw the shelves in the back of the library. Every one of those books is a portal to another place. It could be somewhere on Earth, or it could be somewhere else.’

‘And the Readers create the books?’

‘Or they find them, or steal them from other Readers.’

‘Are these other worlds inside the books? Or do they exist anyway, and the book only opens a doorway to them? If nobody had written the book, would the place it goes to still exist? Or—’

‘They exist,’ Ashes said. ‘You’ll drive yourself mad thinking like that. People have, believe me. It’s like wondering whether the inside of your closet still exists when you shut the door. Keep on down that path and you end up thinking the whole universe is a dream of someone in someone else’s dream, or some such nonsense. All you need to know is that Master Geryon keeps the books here, and sometimes they leak. There are things prowling this library that you wouldn’t like to meet on a dark night.’

‘Not the things from the prison-books, though.’

‘No. Those are different.’

Alice considered for a moment. ‘What about Mr Wurms? If he’s not a Reader, does that mean he came out of a book as well?’