The Dragon Librarian

One: The Library That Was Always Shut

The Mossbarrow Lending Library had been shut every day of Nell Pickle's life, which was exactly ten years, two months, and one rainy Tuesday.

She knew the building the way you know a tooth you aren't supposed to wiggle. Grey stone gone green with damp. Tall windows like shut eyes. A door the colour of an old penny, and above it, in letters so faded they were really only the ghosts of letters, a sign: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.

Nobody had ever seen the repairs. Nobody had ever seen them finish, either.

"Don't dawdle there, love," her mum said whenever they passed. "That place gives me the collywobbles." And Gran, who lived in the back bedroom now and mostly talked to the wallpaper, would lean close to Nell's ear and whisper, "Wipe your feet going in. He can't abide a muddy floor, the old crank." Then she would laugh until she coughed, and Mum would say Gran was off with the fairies again, poor lamb.

Nell had read everything else in Mossbarrow worth reading. The two shelves at the corner shop, which were mostly recipes and one murder. The crate of swollen paperbacks at the church fete. The backs of the cereal boxes, twice, and the small print on the cereal boxes once, for emergencies. She read the way other children breathed — without noticing, and very badly if you tried to stop her.

So when the penny-coloured door stood open a hand's width that Tuesday, with the rain coming down as if the sky had finally given up holding it, Nell did the only sensible thing a person who has run clean out of books can do.

She went in.

Inside, the dark was the deep brown of strong tea. Lamps with green glass shades burned low along the aisles, and the aisles went up and up, taller than houses, taller than seemed allowed, the shelves leaning their heads together at the top to gossip. Dust drifted down through the lamplight like the slowest snow in the world. The whole place smelled of paper and woodsmoke and something else — something warm and odd, like burnt toast and plum jam left too near the fire.

On the front desk sat a brass bell, polished to a shine, with a little card beside it that read: Ring ONCE. We can hear perfectly well.

Nell, who always did what cards told her, rang it once.

The sound did not echo. It was swallowed at once, the way a snowflake is swallowed by a coat. Then, from very far back in the stacks, where the lamplight gave up entirely, came a clatter, a tiny crash, and a voice — cross, and clipped, and considerably smaller than Nell expected.

"We are closed," said the voice. "We have been closed for forty-seven years. Kindly read the sign."

"I did," said Nell. "It's faded. You can't really read it any more."

There was a pause, the sort of pause a grown-up makes when you've caught them out.

"Then how," said the voice, much closer now, and curling up out of the dark along with a thread of smoke and the smell of plum jam, "did you read the card by the bell?"

And that was when the lamplight caught two small spectacles, two larger green eyes behind them, and a curl of tail no longer than a teaspoon flicking the dust off a shelf.

Two: The Smallest, Fussiest Dragon

It was a dragon.

There was no use pretending it was anything else, though Nell tried for a full three seconds, in which she considered: a very large lizard, a cat in a coat, a trick. None of these explained the smoke. None of them explained the wings, folded neat as a closed umbrella, or the scales the colour of an old leather book, or the way it wore half-moon spectacles on the very tip of its snout and peered at her over the top of them as though she were a date stamped in the wrong place.

It was about the size of a fox who has been eating well. It stood on the desk with its tail wrapped twice round an inkpot, and it looked Nell up and down the way her teacher looked at homework she suspected of being done on the bus.

"Muddy," it said. "I knew it. There is mud on my floor."

"Sorry." Nell wiped her shoes on the back of her socks, which only moved the mud somewhere new. "You're a dragon."

"I am a librarian," said the dragon, with great offence, as though dragon were the rude word and librarian the polite one. "Pemberton. Keeper of the Quiet Shelf, Lender of Last Resort, and Reader the First of the Mossbarrow Lending Library, which is closed." He sniffed. "You may call me Mr Pemberton."

"I'm Nell," said Nell. "Nell Pickle."

The dragon, who had been reaching for a pot of tea no bigger than an egg cup, went very still.

"Pickle," he said. The word came out carefully, the way you carry a full cup down stairs. "There was a Pickle, once. Iris. Sharp girl. Wiped her feet." He shook himself, scales whispering. "No matter. Whoever you are, child, you cannot be in here. It is not safe. Out you go, before —"

The kettle began to whistle.

Now, Nell had heard a great many kettles whistle. This one did not whistle like a kettle wanting tea. It whistled high and thin and rising, like a kettle that had seen something dreadful in the next room, and Pemberton's whole manner changed. The teapot was forgotten. He shot up the nearest shelf, claws catching the wood, spectacles flashing, and from somewhere among his scales he produced a thing Nell would come to know very well: a wooden date-stamp, the sort that goes thunk on a library card, except that this one glowed faintly red along its handle, like a poker pulled half out of the fire.

"What's wrong?" Nell asked. "Why's the kettle doing that?"

"The kettle," said Pemberton, climbing, not looking back, "is the alarm. The kettle only sings when the Quiet Shelf is leaking." He reached the top of the aisle and looked down at her, and for the first time he did not look fussy at all. He looked frightened, and trying not to be, which is worse.

"And I'm afraid, Nell Pickle," he said, "it is leaking rather a lot."

From the deep dark at the back of the library, something growled — long and low and unmistakably hungry — and a book the size of a doormat came flapping out of the shadows on its own two covers, straight at Nell's head.