“But what are they, you great red slowpoke?” growled Blunderbuss.
The Wyverary lowered his head so that his dancing orange eyes could get right up close to September. “September, have you ever been reading along in a lovely book, impatient to get to the next exciting bit, when out of nowhere you noticed that some word or other was spelled entirely wrong? Or the quotation marks faced the wrong way? Or came across a scene where a fellow’s eyes were suddenly blue, when they’d been green up till now? Or perhaps you wanted very much to know what happened to the lady in plaid from Chapter Three, but the author seemed to have forgotten all about her and you never found out?”
“I suppose,” September answered slowly.
“Well, that’s all the book bears’ fault! All books are born perfect, you see. Sometimes they stay perfect, but really, rather more often than anyone would like, the book bears get to them. They’re tiny bears the color of pages with a million teeth and clever claws. They sneak in at night and chew through the pages of a book, gnawing and munching and gulping. They nibble a letter or two out of words and leave behind…” Ell shuddered. “Typos. They dig into the paragraphs and mix up details so that the fellow with green eyes wakes up one day with blue ones. They chew through plots until the story doesn’t hang together quite right anymore. They’re a menace! And once a bear has gotten to one copy of a book, they can just tunnel right through to all the other copies, leaving their messes all over the place for poor copy editors to clean up! All Librarians gird themselves against book bears like doctors wear masks to keep out the plague. I’ve had nightmares! I dream I’m covered in them, and they keep chomping off the letters in my name until I’m C-Through-J and I don’t even know what the Barleybroom’s called anymore!”
Greenwich Mean Time nodded approvingly. “Quite right! But the Great Grand Library came to a truce with the bears long ago, and now the bears of Meridian only devour our enemies—the untidy, the tardy, and the careless! At one word from me they will swarm over you, gobbling up your continuity, carving up your history, scrambling up the letters of you until you forget how to spell your own soul! I’ve got a cave full of them in the Satire Cellar and they’re very hungry.”
“We’ll be careful,” said Saturday, and bent to The History of Fairyland: A How-To Guide. “Could we see the H section, please?” he asked the Reference Desk politely. The pages flew. “Hags, Various. Hats, Notable. Hallowmere, Halloween—look, September! You’re in here!” September leaned over to see a beautiful illustration of her shadow in the deepest of black inks, dancing on the fields of Fairyland-Below. She blushed, feeling both proud and caught in the act of dabbling with history, which surely carried some penalty, somewhere along the way. “Happenstance, Harrowing, Hart, White. Hart, Black. Hart, Red. Hart, Motley. There are a lot of harts in here. I thought they were extinct. Ah. Heart.”
September didn’t know what she’d hoped to find. A full-color illustration, along with a map, a train schedule, and a packed lunch? Maybe a note congratulating them for being so clever as to look it up in the Library rather than skipping all over deserts and fens prying up rocks to peer under. But the ancient book offered none of these. The entry was short. It had no pictures. Saturday read it out loud: