Page 36 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)
Thirty-Six
Ghostgill: A creature that looks half ghost, half mushroom. Shaped almost like a tiny figure pretending to be a ghost, with a sheet over its head. Eleven inches tall. Body is white, with lots of folds, like the gills on the underside of a fly agaric mushroom. They live in creeks and would pass for plants were it not for the way they walk, slowly, like starfish.
Paranimals, A through M , Tempest Family Grimoire
We have found ourselves in an ancient city of trees so towering that Morgan and I, from the bottom, can’t see how high it goes. Birds trill, their music filtering down in ethereal echoes. The air is cool and clammy, mist soaking our ankles.
There is a tall lamp growing out of the soil, with a post of braided iron. Its gentle light spills onto the mossy floor below, the night and dense foliage diffusing it to an emerald green.
“Hey, they’ve got electricity out here!” Morgan raps the lamppost. “Or…hmm. It must be solar-powered.”
“That’s strange. I didn’t put a lamp here.”
Morgan peers at me. “Why would you have?”
Black shapes rising to chest level are slow to appear, given the lack of illumination. They’re shelves. Square plastic milk crates, rectangular wooden crates, and cardboard boxes have been stacked together in a vertical triangle, like a Christmas tree. They’ve been carefully decorated with books, and a memory falls into my thoughts like a shooting star into the sea.
The Traveler’s Library.
That’s what I’d called it.
When I was small, slipping into the woods to build my hideaway. I didn’t have quite enough space to be myself at home, and I’d felt like The Magick Happens was Luna’s haven more than mine, a special place for her and Grandma Dottie to be an inseparable pair. There wasn’t anywhere that I belonged. So I made my own haven out here, one book at a time. I’d stacked my unfinished stories between those by authors I admired: Zilpha Keatley Snyder and Vivian Vande Velde.
Morgan slides a composition notebook off a shelf—the type with black splotches all over a white cover. It’s titled Phantasmagoria in handwriting that was honestly much neater when I was ten years old than it is now, and beneath that: by Zelda Margaret Tempest .
I drape my braid over one shoulder, twisting the ends. “I can’t believe I forgot about all this.”
Morgan flips through the book. It’s barely three chapters long, because in those days I got bored quickly and was too impatient, continually starting over, starting over. Any time I scraped enough quarters together, I was down at the dollar store buying notebooks.
The Clock of Old and New was always talking about how she used to be human, and had butter-yellow hair. That was before the sorceress stuffed her inside a clock.
There was a secret princess inside this clock. She had wooden hair and her arms and legs were wooden, too. One leaf grew from her left knee. If Fortuna could only find the key, she could free the princess.
“This is what I’ve been hearing,” I whisper. “It’s…”
Morgan’s eyes are terribly bright as they rest on me. “You.”
Not brays. Stories. I’ve been hearing stories—some I wrote long, long ago, and others, I suspect, must be glimpses of stories I still have waiting inside me: books and books and books yet to come.
“Does magic want you to finish what you started?” Morgan speculates, sifting through dozens of notebooks. “Look at this.”
Once upon a time, nobody went into the forest and came out of it alive. A little boy named Theodore lived by himself in a cottage at the edge of it, and he could hear dangerous monsters lurking. His father had been dragged away by wolves made of water, who charged out of the sea every full moon.
“Reminds me of waravers,” he notes. “Creatures made of water, living by moonlight.”
“Waravers, werewolves. Similar sound. That has to be where I took the idea.”
Many of my stories borrowed characters from each other, recycling favorite titles. I’ve got a “Tale of Elixir” about an actual drinkable elixir and a “Tale of Elixir” about a prince named Elixir. What an adventure, to tumble through words however I wanted, rolling down hills of them, the story growing bigger and wilder around me like a snowball that picks up more of the world as it goes. “Baby Zelda was quite a prolific writer,” he says.
“Easy to write fast when you don’t have to care about spelling. Or plot. Or an ending.” I grin at him, which he mirrors. “I don’t think I actually completed a manuscript until I was a teenager, and it couldn’t have been longer than twenty thousand words. I burned it a week later because I’d named one of the characters after a guy I had a crush on and couldn’t risk anyone finding out.”
“I didn’t start writing until I was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three,” Morgan tells me. “I started with online reviews, just for fun. These long, stupid think pieces about pizza cutters or whatever I’d ordered. It turned into fiction exercises—like, I’d say that a shower cap I bought made me have dreams about The Sopranos every night, or I’d complain that my bicycle arrived without a built-in toaster, as if that was the standard. Some of my posts got taken down for not being verified purchases.”
“Of course that would be your journalism origin story,” I say, doubling over. Morgan blushes with pleasure to have made me laugh. “You troll.”
“Those reviews weren’t a total waste of time, turns out. I printed a few to show the Moonville Tribune when I applied, and they liked them.” He tilts his head. “To be fair, they had no choice but to hire me because they were understaffed and desperate, but still!”
“And now you’re the entire newspaper,” I say simply.
There’s no disguising the admiration in my voice, and Morgan stands two inches taller. He straightens an invisible bow tie. “And now I’m the entire newspaper. Speaking of which, if you’re ever looking for a side gig, you should write serialized short stories for the Moonville Tribune . We don’t have the budget to pay you much, but it could be fun.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I spy a familiar spine on the shelf, this one of a published book. “ The Magnificent Mummy Maker! I loved this one. I forced Luna to read it, too. Then Luna forced me to read that.” I point out The Forestwife by Theresa Tomlinson. “We still trade book recommendations.”
“Add me to that group chat, please.” He thumbs through The Time-Travelling Cat . “I think I read this when I was in elementary school.”
“Ooooh, yes, me, too.” I scan the cover and am instantly transported to second grade, curled up on a beanbag in Mrs. Kipley’s classroom. Reading for Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program. I can still taste the personal pan pizza.
We study copyright pages to discern how old some of these are, impressed by the condition we’ve found them in.
“How aren’t they moldy?” I exclaim. “The pages aren’t warped, the paper doesn’t feel funky.” I bring a book to my nose. “Doesn’t smell funky, either.”
“While we’re on the topic, how did you carry all this out here and not get lost? I can’t hear any cars, so there’s no way we’re close to town.”
“I’d fill up my backpack. I really couldn’t tell you how I didn’t get lost. The way I remember it, the trail here used to be straightforward, easy to access.” I didn’t only bring books. I nicked trinkets from home and the shop to decorate my library with: flattened souvenir pennies, a locket necklace, one of Grandma’s hats, buttons, beads, keys, and lenticular stickers with images that change when tilted. A blanket, too, that’s stiff as plastic and partially disintegrated now. All of it is dirty and decomposing.
But the books…
The books are impeccably preserved.
“I’m sorry, but this is precious.” Morgan braces himself for my wrath. “Papaya, you’re adorable. I know you don’t want to be. I know you think you’re a sentient knife. But this is the cutest thing I have seen, ever.”
I grumble, secretly pleased. “Young Zelda would have been happy to know I’m visiting as an adult who has real published books on real shelves.” My chest tightens as I open another notebook, titled The Zany Adventures of Zoey Werewolf . “She dreamed of seeing our name in this library someday.”
Morgan brightens. “Young Zelda is about to watch her dreams become realized.”
“Oh?” I pitch forward, curious, as he unzips his bag. Removes a paperback copy of The Heartbreak Vampire .
I stare at it. My name on the spine.
Zelda Tempest next to R. L. Stine . The child in me jumps up and down. She runs and twirls, arms outspread. She can’t believe we’ve done it, we’ve made it, and even if I never publish another book again, I’ll always have achieved this.
“Now these are what I consider the classics,” Morgan tells Forte as he exhumes Goosebumps books. “ The Ghost Next Door. Ghost Beach. Say Cheese and Die! I inhaled these sorts of books. No wonder I turned out like this.”
Morgan and I rest against the Traveler’s Library. He audibly wonders who put the lamp here if I didn’t, and how the books are still in such good condition. Then he reads Ghost Beach aloud to me until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore, nodding off.
When I return Ghost Beach to the shelf, I slide off The Heartbreak Vampire . It is the most unnerving déjà vu, to be back here again, standing right at the brink of a story. Preparing to tumble in.
I make myself comfortable at the foot of the lamppost, taking in the cover of my book anew, flushed green in a magical glow. How many other humans all over the world have held this in their hands, looking at this same cover?
I turn the pages. Title, dedication.
This one’s for Dottie, who taught me about magic.
And I begin to read.
The wood is sweet with rot tonight, and as Henriette draws her breath from it, every living thing falls still.
I can’t stop reading. Chapter one bleeds into chapter two, into chapter three. I thought I would hate it, have avoided revisiting it for fear I’d find imperfections. And there are imperfections. If I could have another crack at edits, surely I’d find plenty to change. But I can’t really care about any of that, because all I notice is how much fun I was having here in these pages. My love for storytelling radiates from them.
Henriette has a dimple in her cheek just below her left eye, like I do. She wears green boater shoes to work, and a silver mask when she’s fighting monsters. She is softhearted like Romina, but direct like Luna, and bold like Aisling. She has my grandmother’s way of speaking with such sincerity as to nearly embarrass those she’s conversing with. Henriette Albrittey is a mosaic of myself and the people I love most in the world, and I am proud of her.
I’ve forgotten the joy of creating. What a wonder it is, to find it hiding inside this book in the middle of the forest—a book I’ve had at home, in nine different languages, all this time. I could never bring myself to open it, so afraid I’d be disappointed by what I found, or worse—to feel like I’ll never be able to write anything as good as it. But I have more stories in me.
So many more.
Nobody else will ever read this book the way that I do. Flipping open to chapter eleven, I see Christmas in Iceland between the lines. In chapter twenty, a desert sunset on Route 66, snapping pictures to send to my grandmother. Chapter thirty-two: eating a huge blueberry cobbler at a diner in Michigan. Spilling coffee on myself while working at a café. Falling in love more than a few times.
I see my life as it was while writing this story, and the story itself, twisting into one.
I think it’s the most wondrous thing, to have captured a time capsule of my past in here without realizing it. It will always be this way. Once I’m finished with my next book, whatever that may be, someday I’ll reopen it, and highlights from right now—at that point, my past—will rise from between the lines to say hello. What unrelated memories will I find attached? What will ultimately prove significant in my life today when viewing it in hindsight? I think I’ll definitely remember this moment. I think I’ll see Morgan everywhere in that book.
I keep reading, long after I should have joined Morgan in sleep, unable to stop now that I’ve started, so many years after I penned The End .
It’s just me and the words and the moon and the magic; it feels like wrapping hands around my own heart, it feels like the best it gets . Tears splash the pages, and I keep turning them, keep turning.