Chapter 1

158 words

On the morning the fog refused to lift, Mira found a door standing alone in the middle of Barrow Field, attached to nothing, held up by nothing, humming very quietly to itself. She circled it three times before she noticed the doorknob was shaped like a snail shell, and that it was, very slowly, turning.

She should have run home. Every sensible instinct told her so. Instead, Mira pressed her ear to the wood and heard, faintly, the sound of a kettle whistling somewhere that smelled of cinnamon and rain. Behind her, the fog had thickened into something almost solid, swallowing the hedgerows whole.

When she finally turned the handle, the door did not swing forward or back, as doors are supposed to. It swung sideways, folding the field itself like a page in a book, and Mira stepped through into a library that had no walls, only shelves, stretching up past where the sky should have been.