The library really was beautiful. Old and historic, it was absolutely one of my favorite parts about Boston. Even though it had only been built in 1852, there was something about ancient books and the wisdom they held that made it feel older. Some buildings just have a feeling in them. This library was one of them.
As we moved onto the sixth room, I felt my heart beginning to sink.
“What if we don’t find anything here, Nathaniel?” I asked as my shoulders slumped. We walked from one room to the next. “Or what if what we’re looking for is locked up in the special sections behind glass?”
“It seems nearly impossible to me that we won’t find something,” he answered. And from his tone, I could tell he was getting frustrated. “We found several books at Alderidge. This library is about eight times bigger. The odds just don’t seem right.”
“I mean, my mother was coming here regularly and going through all these books,” I said as we stepped into the next room. I dropped my voice. “Maybe she already found everything there was to find here.”
“It seems unlikely,” Nathaniel said as he held up his pencil. “Considering we have a much easier method than having to read through all seventeen million books that exist within these walls.”
He was right. But I was simply trying to make us feel better.
At twenty minutes to the time we were supposed to meet back out front, Nathaniel and I stepped into the last room.
These were foreign language books. There were quite a variety of them. And they varied in age quite a bit from the look of the spines.
I let go of hope. We weren’t going to find anything here. Mom had already found everything there was to find. We would move on from the library empty handed.
Shelf after shelf, we moved through the books. My pencil stayed looking exactly like a pencil. All of these books were just that—books. Every one of them held their own kind of magic, just not the kind we needed.
Nathaniel and I got closer and closer. We’d started on opposite ends of the room and slowly worked our way toward the middle.
I let out a sigh as I came to the end of the last shelf.
But suddenly Nathaniel froze.
I looked over my shoulder.
And like a miracle, the wand in his hand was glowing blue.
He looked over at me, his eyes filled with wonder and relief. I jumped to his side and he pulled the book off the shelf and immediately flipped it open.
It was written in a language I didn’t even recognize. The characters didn’t make sense to me, and it certainly wasn’t Latin based.
“You recognize this at all?” I asked.
Nathaniel shook his head and looked up. There was a woman working at the desk at the entry way of the room, bent over a volume. He crossed to her.
“Excuse me,” he said as he opened the book and laid it down on the counter. “Can you tell me what language this is written in?”
She peered at Nathaniel from over her reading glasses. She seemed annoyed at being disturbed, but she pushed her book aside and pulled Nathaniel’s closer to her. She closed the book and looked at the spine.
“Sanskrit,” she pronounced and pushed the book back toward Nathaniel.
He muttered a thank you and requested to check it out. The woman continued to act annoyed at the disturbance, but she did her job and stamped a card that said the book was due back in two weeks.
Little did she know that we were most likely never going to return it.
“I don’t even know where Sanskrit is from,” I confessed as we walked out of the room and started making our way back toward the front doors.
“The middle east,” Nathaniel said. “Though it’s largely considered a dead language. Only a few people in Nepal claim it anymore.”
I shook my head, both at the ridiculousness of that, and that Nathaniel knew the information off the top of his head. “I don’t suppose you know this particular language.”
“Not at all,” he said. I could feel the gears turning in his head. “I don’t think any of the professors at Alderidge know it either. There are no courses at our school. We really might have to make a trip to Harvard sometime, just to see if they have anyone who knows it.”
We walked between the lion statues in the main entry way and then down the stairs to the front doors.
Mary-Beth and Borden were waiting outside already, hugging their coats tight to themselves to keep warm.
“Nothing?” I asked in shock, noting their empty hands.
“Nothing,” Borden confirmed, and I could see the disappointment in him in his shoulders.
“And what we found is in a dead language very, very few people still know,” Nathaniel said in a frustrated huff as he held up the book.
I was trying very, very hard to not let out all my frustrations. I wanted to vent and rage that this was impossible. Trying to recover every magical book in the world was just too much. It was too big for us.
But I kept my mouth shut.
“Come on,” Mary-Beth said wisely. “We all need food. No use us all getting hangry.”
She led us to a sandwich and soup shop she’d been to before. We ordered and all sat at a table by the window that looked out onto the busy street.
“I was joking before, saying that my mother probably picked through every magical book that was here,” I said as I picked at my roll while we waited for our food. “But maybe she truly did. She had years of combing through that library.”
No one really said anything, because we were all thinking the same thing. She missed four books at Alderidge, and she had access to that library every single day.
“We’re more likely to find something in Salem,” I said, trying to sound confident, to bring up the mood in the room. “We know there were two witches there, maybe more. There has to be something real left over in that town.”
“I’ve never been to Salem before,” Mary-Beth said. I felt the forced excitement in her voice, and I appreciated that she was trying to pick up the mood. “Think we can go find the sites where they hung the witches?”
“Those were your literal ancestors,” Borden said, glaring at her. “You really want to see where they were murdered?”
Mary-Beth made a face and shrugged. “Maybe it will help us tap into something. Unleash whatever is locked up in me. Maybe it will be some magical place for me.”
She was kind of trying to be funny, kind of not joking.
“Maybe,” I said, because I wanted her to feel better.
We ate our lunch, and then we all trekked back to the car.
It was a fifty-minute drive from Boston to Salem. No one said much of anything. We were all lost in our own heads, overwhelmed with the task at hand.
Would we just spend our lives knowing a couple of tricks that helped us out every now and then? Had we been thinking we would become something more than what we ever could? Maybe we were just being arrogant, thinking we were special, different from all the other people around us because we had special blood.
Really, we were just a couple of college kids who could make things float and alter people’s memories.
We pulled into Salem at two o’clock. It was an exceptionally sunny day, I was grateful for that at least.
The public library was a nice-looking red brick building. The sign out front said it had been built in 1887, so like the Boston Public, it really wasn’t that exceptionally old, considering how old the towns themselves were.