Excerpt:

“Good morning, library!” Briony cried when Evangeline had unlocked the door and they dripped in the hallway. Mr Caruthers was slightly later, and arrived to find Briony embracing a bookshelf impulsively; Camilla sewing steadily and looking as though she were firmly solemn about everything, though her eyes were glinting and the corners of her mouth were not precisely frowning; and Evangeline, bright-eyed with snow still melting in the candle flame of her hair, nestling into her desk like a bird coming back to her nest – already she had a pile of books, one of which laid already open before her, so as she sorted library miscellany she would peer at the page. Already too her fingers were freckled with ink, and her mouth pursed, and the desk turning into a living thing again, a strange, small sort of home, carpeted with books and teacups and a covered plate of muffins – one of which she offered to Mr Caruthers when he greeted her. “I’ve had breakfast,” he told her, and she laughed, and so he took it anyway. It was rich and full of cinnamon, and hearth-warmth.

Before very long they had all of the lights on, and the fireplace gleaming with warmth, and Camilla put down her sewing and her frown long enough to straighten all of the tables and chairs so that they looked irresistibly cosy. Evangeline sat at her desk trying to read two books at once, and Mr Caruthers disappeared as usual into the cavern of his office, and all of the doors were unlocked, and the library waited to be alive again.

And people did come. Slowly, at first, perhaps warily, but then it had been a month since anything had happened to the library – no victims sprawled like a gash, like a warning on the sidewalk in front of the building, no fires and vampires and dead children Downstairs. Evangeline was soon delightedly busy issuing new library cards and leading people to the books they did not yet know how badly they needed, and soon the library flowed again, bloomed again; soon the library was a real place once again, rather than the empty shell of one, full of a skeleton made of books and desks.

There were, however, very few children.

Older schoolchildren, of the sort who considered losing themselves in a book the very best pastime for wiling away the weekend holiday – they came, in clusters, in flocks, and occasionally alone or in pairs, looking for adventures novels and – one boy with black black hair and a red jacket did not yet know that what he wanted most in the world was Pushkin.

But the Room Downstairs still echoed with its little ghosts.

Evangeline could hear the whispering of them, the stories of them, and she waited for the voices Upstairs to clear out the wind howl of lost things that still grew in That Room (a spine snapped like a warning, like a flag on a mountain conquered), and she wondered how long these things would take.

She wondered if anyone else could hear them.

You smell of stories.

This is my library. This is my home. You are not welcome here. Take your ghosts and leave me.

The ghosts would never leave, she thought. The ghost of her old life hovered over her shoulder, wry and sad, with a twist to her mouth. The ghost of her old life walked home in the dark and did not worry. The ghost of her old life had no leather and steel jingling on her arm.

And every so often, someone would pull a book from the shelf, and it would go flying haphazardly away, as though the magnets were misaligned, as though it did not want to be handled, and she would have to go and fetch it, and calm the spells down again, and when she bent to pick it up, there was a whispering in it, and not all of the whispering belonged to the words pressed into its pages.