On that gloomy thought, he swung his feet up onto his desk and leaned back in his chair. He’d probably get used to the smell of second-hand books one day, just stop noticing it, and then he’d be doomed. He’d put down traps, checked the walls, and taken a broom to what floor was visible as well as to the accumulating cobwebs on the fog-stained ceiling. The place reeked of old paper over the fainter odours of damp, dust, and rodents.

So here he was, at the shop desk with books double stacked in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that turned the room into a maze, books piled on every flat surface and against every vertical one, books half-obscuring the windows. He had yet to find an inventory, and was increasingly convinced the old bugger had kept his records in his head.

He occupied some of the extremely long periods when nobody came into the shop by trying to calculate how many volumes his uncle had stuck him with, and had concluded it could easily be forty thousand. And he owned a lot of books, although just now and then, when it got dark and the shelves loomed over him, he got the feeling that they owned him. He’d have Uncle William’s savings too, once probate had been sorted out. He was master of an entire building with a shop floor, two upstairs rooms, and a cubbyhole at the ground floor back which was all the space his uncle had allowed for human life. Martin’s Lane, the goodwill such as it was, and the stock. He was dead, and Will, his sole heir, had inherited Darling’s Used & Antiquarian: the premises on May’s Buildings off St. So much that, when Uncle William had died, Will remembered an ancient piece of lore about bees, and he’d cleared his throat and told the books, He’s gone. As he took over the running of the place in his uncle’s last illness, though, he became increasingly aware of them looming around him, full of knowledge and secrets and lies. When he’d first visited his uncle at Darling’s Used & Antiquarian, he’d simply thought, That’s a lot of books, and when he’d started helping here, they were just work. This book contains references to a pandemic and the spread of infectious disease.Ī full list of content warnings is available at my websiteįor the essential workers keeping us goingĪnd for everyone who’s supporting them by staying home CHAPTER ONE

Kj charles slippery creatures