The Midnight Library - Matt Haig Page 0,21
not right, you kneeling on the floor.’ And Nora turned to see a chair behind her that she hadn’t noticed before. An antique chair – mahogany and buttoned leather, Edwardian maybe – with a brass bookstand attached to one arm. ‘Give yourself a moment.’
Nora sat down.
She stared at her watch. No matter how much of a moment she gave herself it stayed being midnight.
‘I still don’t like this. One life of sadness was enough. What is the point of risking more?’
‘Fine.’ Mrs Elm shrugged.
‘What?’
‘Let’s do nothing then. You can just stay here in the library with all those lives waiting on the shelves and not choose one.’
Nora sensed Mrs Elm was playing some kind of a game. But she went along with it.
‘Fine.’
So Nora just stood there while Mrs Elm picked up her book again.
It seemed unfair to Nora that Mrs Elm could read the lives without falling into them.
Time went by.
Although technically, of course, it didn’t.
Nora could have stayed there for ever without getting hungry or thirsty or tired. But she could, it seemed, get bored.
As time stood still, Nora’s curiosity about the lives around her slowly grew. It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.
‘Why can’t you just give me a life you know is a good one?’ she said suddenly.
‘That is not how this library works.’
Nora had another question.
‘Surely in most lives I will be asleep now, won’t I?’
‘In many, yes.’
‘So, what happens then?’
‘You sleep. And then you wake up in that life. It’s nothing to worry about. But if you are nervous, you could try a life where it’s another time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it’s not night-time everywhere, is it?’
‘What?’
‘There are an infinite number of possible universes in which you live. Are you really saying they all exist on Greenwich Mean Time?’
‘Of course not,’ said Nora. She realised she was about to cave in and choose another life. She thought of the humpback whales. She thought of the unanswered message. ‘I wish I had gone to Australia with Izzy. I would like to experience that life.’
‘Very good choice.’
‘What? It’s a very good life?’
‘Oh, I didn’t say that. I merely feel that you might be getting better at choosing.’
‘So, it’s a bad life?’
‘I didn’t say that either.’
And the shelves sped into motion again, then stopped a few seconds afterwards.
‘Ah, yes, there it is,’ said Mrs Elm, taking a book from the second-to-bottom shelf. She recognised it instantly, which was odd, seeing that it looked almost identical to the others around it.
She handed it to Nora, affectionately, as if it was a birthday gift.
‘There you go. You know what to do.’
Nora hesitated.
‘What if I am dead?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean, in another life. There must be other lives in which I died before today.’
Mrs Elm looked intrigued. ‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘Well, yes, but—’
‘You have died an infinite number of times before today, yes. Car accident, drug overdose, drowning, a bout of fatal food poisoning, choking on an apple, choking on a cookie, choking on a vegan hot dog, choking on a non-vegan hot dog, every illness it was possible for you to catch or contract . . . You have died in every way you can, at any time you could.’
‘So, I could open a book and just die?’
‘No. Not instantaneously. As with Voltaire, the only lives available here are, well, lives. I mean, you could die in that life, but you won’t have died before you enter the life because this Midnight Library is not one of ghosts. It is not a library of corpses. It is a library of possibility. And death is the opposite of possibility. Understand?’
‘I think so.’
And Nora stared at the book she had been handed. Conifer green. Smooth-textured, again embossed with that broad and frustratingly meaningless title My Life.
She opened it and saw a blank page, so she moved to the next page and wondered what was going to happen this time. ‘The swimming pool was a little busier than normal . . .’
And then she was there.
Fire
She gasped. The sensations were sudden. The noise and the water. She had her mouth open and she choked. The tang and sting of salt water.
She tried to touch her feet on the bottom of the pool but she was out of her depth so she quickly slipped into breaststroke mode.
A swimming pool, but a salt-water one. Outdoor, beside the ocean. Carved seemingly out of the rock that jutted out of the coastline. She