Glimmers

An Inkling of Magic - Chapter 1

The smell of the old, cloth bound books wrapped around Elspeth like the familiar warmth of a much loved blanket welcoming her back. It was only a small bookstore with a few dedicated collectors who somehow managed to find Hydendale on a Massachusetts map, but it was almost a second home to her.

She'd first found the place after ducking into it one day two years ago on her way home from school. She hadn't intended to stay long, only until one Derek Corvelle and his merry little band of fawning shadows always eager to win his approval by tormenting her – the object of his apparent disdain though she could never figure out why – had safely passed by and and she could escape without being noticed. Leaving her once more to the blissful walk of solitude and the knowledge that she could soon immerse herself in her many journals and sketchbooks.

Instead, almost three hours passed before Elspeth, tracing her fingers across each dusty shelf, realized that they were no longer around, having paid the unassuming store not a second's glance and running on passed it down the lane. Since then, it had become her sanctuary, the one place no one ever thought to look for her, it was almost as if no one knew it was there. A place that mirrored Elspeth's own carefully practiced invisibility in the crowded classrooms and halls of Hyde-Moore High School, named after its founders Joseph Hyde and Isabel Moore and whose name echoed her personal sentiments and strategy on how to survive until graduation –  now mere months away.

Elspeth was always quiet at school, much preferring to simply blend into the background and just observe than to participate and draw someone's attention. It's not that she was without friends, she wasn't, but high school was a very dangerous place where seniors roamed the halls like predators looking for what poor freshman or unsuspecting newcomer they could devour. They were even known to turn on their own if you weren't one of the favoured few. If you were smart, you made yourself as invisible as possible and did absolutely nothing to stand out. It was something at which Elspeth had excelled, having only ever garnered a passing glance or snicker when she was called upon by a teacher to answer some question.

That is until Derek's family moved to town and he ripped away every shield and shadow she'd used to hide behind. He somehow saw her when no one else did and Elspeth didn't exactly know how she felt about that. Wait,... no, she did know: disconcerted; highly, irrepressibly, and unequivocally disconcerted. It wasn't only that he noticed her, though she had done everything humanly possible to become unnoticeable, but that he always seemed to know when she was around. Entering a room, his eyes would find her, regardless of who had arrived first or how crowded it was, he always found her. She couldn't hide from him. She'd been able to hide from everyone else, but she couldn't hide from him and, now, because of him, she couldn't hide at all.

Possessing a charisma that drew everyone to him, everyone that is but Elspeth, he had quickly risen in the treacherous hierarchy that lorded over and tyrannized the halls and classrooms. Oh, she'd noticed him. Tall with tussled dark hair and eyes as green as new sprung grass, it was hard not to, but, apparently, she was one of the few members of the school's populace, including the teachers and staff, that were immune to his charms.

The memories of how she'd first come to notice the old bookstore faded as she turned the last corner of the narrow, labyrinthine maze of bookcases to finally arrive at her favorite reading nook tucked away in the back corner of the store. She shook her head with a smile as she noticed that a new, brightly coloured pillow now adorned the chair that the kindly old owner had placed there just for her. He had found her there once fallen asleep on the floor amidst a small mountain of avalanching books and had had to be wake her up because they were about to close. The next day, when she made her usual visit to the store on the way home from school, she found that some of the shelves had been rearranged to make room for a single armchair the perfect size for her to pull her entire body onto and curl up in. She'd mouthed a quiet 'thank you' to him as she'd left and, ever since, she would come in to find new pillows and throw blankets wordlessly make their appearance on the armchair.

A sigh of relief escaped her as she unburdened her aching shoulders of the vintage leather backpack she took to school every day, and flopped down onto the armchair. Her eyes slid closed as she leaned back and simply enjoyed the blissful feeling of sitting there surrounded by the closest and dearest of her friends: the books.

“I know that sigh.”

A gentle, knowing voice said from somewhere off to her right.

“Hi, Mr. Grimmlich,” Elspeth greeted the old man cheerily, not needing to open her eyes to know who it was that had found her as she would know that voice anywhere – the way his accent made a 'th' sound more like a 'z'. Despite the dour sound of his name, Mr. Edwyn Grimmlich was the gentlest, warmest soul that Elspeth MacGearney had ever met. She had never heard him raise his voice with anyone and he treated everyone as if they were a long lost friend.

“What was it this time?”

“What was what?”

Mr. Grimmlich chuckled at her clumsy attempt to evade his question.

“You only sigh like that when you've come here to escape,” he elaborated, continuing to push the question, “I may lose track of where I've put my keys, but I'm not so old that I'm not aware of the day or time. School's only just let out so you can't have gone home and fled from your little brother's antics already. Which means, that whatever has you running to the safety of the written realms had to have happened at school. So, what was it this time? Derek again I presume?”

Elspeth opened her eyes to stare at the store owner in amazement.

“You can tell all that from my sigh?” she asked in disbelief, “you sure that you shouldn't have been a detective instead of a storekeeper?”

“That and you still have your backpack with you,” nodding his head towards the discarded leather bag on the floor, “and why would I have wanted to be that? It would have taken me away from my books! What would they do without me?”

She laughed at his exaggerated gestures towards the shelves that surrounded them. Over the last two years, she'd come to love the silly old German and the way he treated his books as if they were his children. Elspeth had even heard him talking to them from time to time when she came into the store and he didn't hear the tinkling of the string of bells tried around the door's handle meant to tell him when someone had arrived. She never let on though that she'd heard him, not wanting him to think she was mocking him. She knew how that felt, and she didn't have to dig all that far back to recall it either.

“It was Derek,” she reluctantly confirmed, her head falling back against the chair to stare dismally at the ceiling as she blew her wavy, auburn hair out of her eyes to blankly watch the busy spider spinning itself a new web as it danced across the ceiling.

“As usual, I was minding my own business near the back of the classroom sketching before Mr. Prickston came in, when Derek started in on me as usual. Asking if I was scribbling fairies again and had I seen any recently to know what they looked like,” Elspeth told him, flinching at the memory.

He had chosen the seat behind her this time and, when he leaned forward to speak into her ear, he had been sure to pitch his voice just loud enough to make sure that everyone else heard also. She could still feel the heat of his breath blowing against her neck and hear the chorus of jeers and laughter ringing in her ears as she quickly tried to hide away the tattered old, leather journal that she used as a sketchbook and carried with her everywhere.

Elspeth had never been so happy to see the stern, doldrum of a history professor than when he'd chosen that moment to show up. A deafening hush had immediately descended on the room like a cold draft in the dead of winter. Though she couldn't help but smirk a little when she heard a sharp yelp behind her from one of Derek's less than brilliant sycophants earning themselves an elbow in the side when they hadn't quieted with everyone else.

“Might I see them?” Mr. Grimmlich's soft voice asked, tearing her away from dredging up other old hurts and self-deprecating thoughts.

With a shrug of her shoulders, she leaned down and pulled the small sketchbook from her bag and placed it in the waiting hands of her friend. There were very few she shared this part of herself with, not since the incident with her sister, Maelyn, when she was seven. She didn't dare. She wasn't going back. Apart from Keiran O'Rourke and his sister Niamh, her only two close friends at school and who were both a grade behind her, Mr. Grimmlich was the only other soul she trusted to not label her as some sort of brainsick kook in need of locking up.

Elspeth watched as his scar covered fingers caressed the faded green leather and the binding that was near on to giving in to the scientific laws of decay. With great caution and decades experience of handling books of even greater fragility, he gently unclasped the journal and, cradling it as one would a newly born child, began to thumb through the pages, many of which had come loose from the binding.

“These are beautiful, my dear,” he praised as he admired each of the drawings – fairies of all kinds with their gossamer wings, gnomes and imps half hidden from the world, there was even a sketch or two of the more fantastical beasts – “Their details so life-like. You have truly captured them.”

A snort escaped her before she could think better of it.

“What? You don't believe me?” his plaintive voice making her look away. She couldn't tell if he were serious or only jesting with her.

She felt as his rough and wrinkled hands lifted her face to look at him. His blue eyes glossy with unshed tears as he read the question in her own pale blue-grey ones: how would you know.

“Ah, my dear fraulein, look around you. I have seen everything from alicorns gracefully soaring among moonlit skies to the zaratan drowning those sailors foolish enough to mistake it for an island. It does not matter if they are real to others or not, they are very real to me,” he told her gently, his face crinkling and bushy white mustache turning up as he smiled encouragingly.

“Now, don't lose all track of time and stay too long like last week or your parents are going to think I'm trying to kidnap you.”

With that he left her alone.

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Still curled up in the armchair, Elspeth was putting on the finishing touches to a drawing she planned later ink and watercolour when the sound of whispering caught her attention.

“Hello? Someone there?” she called out, looking up from her sketch to see she was still just as alone as when Mr. Grimmlich had left. Seeing nothing but the rows upon rows of dark, wooden bookshelves she turned her attention back to the drawing in front of her.

Again, the whispering started, but it was a little bit louder now, though still too faint for her to make out any words.

Standing in haste, she sends her pencils scattering to the ground along with her poor, dilapidated sketchbook, its loose pages falling out, but, just as before, the whispering has stopped. And then, somewhere off to her left, she heard a strange sort of scratching noise of something rough being dragged across the creaky, old oak floors of the store.

With her heart pounding in her chest, Elspeth took a few tentative steps forward, nervous eyes darting around the room. Still nothing. She hears it again, this time, from the other side of her special nook, and whirls around so quickly she very nearly falls over, however, as she does she faintly glimpses what looks to be a thick, scale covered tail slowly disappearing around a bookcase. After finding her balance, she hurried off to where she saw it, but there's nothing there and no trace that there ever had been.

“Brilliant, now I'm seeing and hearing things that don't exist,” she muttered to herself in frustration, the cool wood of the bookcase pressing against her forehead as she leaned into it. She was half tempted to beat her head against it if she thought that it would do any good, but she knew it wouldn't.

Tired and no longer feeling in the mood to draw, Elspeth picked up her pencils and sketchbook pages from where they'd fallen and shoved them into her backpack and went home.

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Later that evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, Elspeth sat on her bed and sorted through the loose sketches that were strewn over the duvet. Her fingers traced each line as remembered when they were made and tried to place each back in their proper order in the journal that lay open in front of her. Some of them had creases and dog ears that weren't there before, having been picked up in a hurry and shoved unceremoniously into her backpack. It was almost physically painful to see them in such disarray, but she'd been so rattled earlier that she hadn't bothered to be delicate with them when gathering them from off the floor and under the armchair. With a gentle touch, she smoothed them all out and rearranged them in her sketchbook. As she did, she recalled what Mr. Grimmlich had told her as he caught her as she was about to leave.

“Leaving so soon?” Elspeth heard a voice ask as her hand grasped the door's handle ready to pull it and be on her way home, “When I said not to stay too long, I did not actually expect you to take me seriously.”

Elspeth turned around to see Mr. Grimmlich coming out from the stack of books, carrying a couple of truly old books that Elspeth had never seen before in the store.

“Just a couple books that a collector asked me to track down for him,” he said when he saw her curiosity over the small bundle in his arms, “they gave me a real chase, but, after months I finally found them. But what is it that has you leaving before I have to threaten to lock you inside as I close? I haven't even had the chance to put a kettle on for some hot chocolate.”

Elspeth shrugged, not really wanting to explain what it was that had her running like a startled rabbit out of the store.

“I guess I'm just not feeling so inspired right now,” she answered haplessly, offering a poor explanation as she tried not to squirm under his penetrating gaze that she knew would be able to see through her. It always could.

“Hmm,” was all the response she received.

She hesitated, looking away to stare at her hand that still clutched the door handle, struggling over whether to ask the question that was troubling her. Finding her courage, she raised her down-caste, eyes to look at him again.

“Is it so wrong or,... or crazy to sometimes wish you could live in the fairy tales you read about?” Elspeth asked, her voice small and heavy with longing and pain, “for even just a little bit of that magic to exist in your life?”

“My dear, we all live in a fairy tale,” Mr. Grimmlich told her gently but with a conviction that staggered her, “just not everyone is capable of seeing it.”

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Hi, everyone! If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and I hope you’ve enjoyed it! ‘An Inkling of Magic’ is a work-in-progress, urban fantasy that I’ve been serializing my chapter drafts of on Patreon for some time and decided to start sharing it here also. Paid subscribers get to read ahead faster than free subscribers (by 10 chapters), but more chapters will be unlocking as new ones are added until, eventually, all of them are unlocked. I will be publishing this book to Amazon at some point down the road and putting it into Kindle Unlimited, but advanced notice will be given before everything is taken down.

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