Last Bus to Everland by Sophie Cameron

Author:Sophie Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

When Kasia talked about her library, I’d pictured it to be like the one at school: shelves of old textbooks and dog-eared paperbacks, round tables in the centre, and a handful of computers to serve a few hundred pupils on one side. But the building she takes me to on Thursday is a castle. Literally. It’s like something straight out of Dracula: dark stone and grey slate perched on a huge crag of rock, with ivy-wrapped walls and pointy turrets piercing low-hanging clouds.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Kasia says. ‘It looks just like the castle in this book of Polish fairy tales I used to have. I almost thought I’d fallen into the story the first time I saw it.’

We climb a long, narrow flight of steps carved into the rock face, towards an imposing set of wooden doors at the front of the building. I’m not totally sure what I’m doing here: I was about to go and find the band when Kasia asked me to come with her instead. Zahra and Nico still aren’t back, and I haven’t seen Miyumi around. We managed to keep the small talk going as we walked through the valley – Christmas, Hogmanay, the book on space she’s reading – but it’s starting to feel a bit awkward without the others to act as a buffer between the two of us.

‘I’ve been meaning to bring you here for a while.’ Kasia turns around to look at me from the top step. We must be five hundred metres up, but neither of us is out of breath. ‘I found something I thought you might like.’

She pushes open the huge wooden doors, and suddenly we’re surrounded by books. Thousands, maybe millions, of books. The rooms are practically made from them: as well as shelf after shelf lining the vast hall in front of us, there are staircases built from encyclopaedias, tables made from paperback novels, corridors between piles of catalogues and magazines. Even the floor is covered in newspapers, some of them dated from almost a century ago. Kasia leads me under an archway formed from Beano and Dandy annuals and into a room so chock full with books, you can’t see the walls behind them.

‘Quite a collection, right?’ She smiles at me. Not the usual stiff half-grin; an actual smile. ‘There are books from all over the world in here. Thousands of languages, every genre. It’s probably the best library on the planet.’

I stop by a huge pile of hardbacks. There are cookbooks, plays, pictures books, anthologies of fairy tales . . . a proper mountain of them, at least ten-feet tall. Some are so well worn, the spines are falling off. I pick up the one closest to me – what looks like a Russian gardening manual – and flip through it.

‘How many of these have you read?’

‘Not enough. I could come here every Thursday till I’m ninety, and I still wouldn’t have time to read them all.’ She picks up a hardback book with Arabic letters stencilled on the cover and runs her fingers down the spine.

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