45. The Dream of the Little Winged Book

While Mr. Holmes was helping to unravel the mystery of the mysterious brick attacks, Alpin was inviting me to sleep over at his grand new palace. He’d had to promise his sisters to do something nice for someone and he felt showing me the inside of his place and telling me all about his visit to Avalon would fit the bill.

Of course, I had been to Avalon with Alpin and had already seen the palace, but Alpin had been so wrapped up in his business there he had barely noticed I had come too and had no memory of my having tagged along at all. As for me, I thought it might be unkind or at least unnecessay to remind Alpin of my presence at Avalon and mean to deprive him of the pleasure of showing his new place off. So I acted as if all this were new to me and let Alpin have his moment of glory.

It was an hour to dawn when Alpin shook me awake.

“Wake up, Arley! You’ve got to hear this. I’ve just had a nightmare.”

I rubbed my eyes and asked Alpin what the nightmare was about.

             

“First I saw a golden cage. Solid gold it was. Of the finest. There was a winged creature in it. It wasn’t a bird. The cage approached me and I saw it was a weird, little, bottle-green book with blue wings and what looked like golden fruit on the cover.”

“A winged book? Did it have a sinister beak too?”

“Nah! It didn’t look dangerous. Plump and roly-poly doll-like. Still, I could tell it was making an effort not to scare me because instead of howling it was whispering softly. `Heeeeellllpp meeeeeee!’ That was what it was saying. Over and over and very softly. Of course, I was spooked out of my mind and began to shout like crazy and it didn’t take me a second to rush out of the library.”

                                                  “The library?”

“I was at  St. Job’s Royal Library, that was where all this happened.”

“How do you know that?”

“When I ran out I left behind a huge sign that pointed to what it said was the royal library of Saint Job.”

“What were you doing there?”

  

“I haven’t the least idea. I’ve never been there and I have never hoped to be.”

“Maybe it’s one of those dreams that happen when someone needs help desperately,” I said. “There may really be something odd going on there and someone might need help. What are you going to do to help?”

“Help? Me? Absolutely nothing. What do I care for a book? And a fat one at that. Is my nightmare better than the ones you have? How does it compare?”

“Well, it’s a dream we might be able to do something about. If we get up at dawn and you come have breakfast at my parents’ house, we can go to a spot in the garden where there is a golden gate half-hidden behind thick bushes of blue hortensias and dark pink fuschias. If you cross it, you find yourself in Apple Island, right in the Honey Meadows. My father uses this gate when he wants to visit the Cider Mills. From there, we could go to the library and check if things are in order there.”