There wasn’t long.

She started to write. Nora wanted to live.

Once she’d finished the inscription she waited a moment. Frustratingly, nothing happened, and she remembered what Mrs Elm had once said. Want is an interesting word. It means lack. So, she crossed that out and tried again.

Nora decided to live.

Nothing. She tried again.

Nora was ready to live.

Still nothing, even when she underlined the word ‘live’. Everywhere now, there was breakage and ruination. The ceiling was falling, razing everything, smothering each of the bookshelves into piles of dust. She gaped over and saw the figure of Mrs Elm, out from under the desk where she had been sheltering Nora, standing there without any fear at all then disappearing completely as the roof caved in almost everywhere, smothering remnants of fire and shelf stacks and all else.

Nora, choking, couldn’t see anything at all now.

But this part of the library was holding out, and she was still there.

Any second now, everything would be gone, she knew it.

So she stopped trying to think about what to write and, in sheer exasperation, just put down the first thing that came to her, the thing that she felt inside her like a defiant silent roar that could overpower any external destruction. The one truth she had, a truth she was now proud of and pleased with, a truth she had not only come to terms with but welcomed openly, with every fiery molecule of her being. A truth that she scribbled hastily but firmly, pressing deep into the paper with the nib, in capital letters, in the first-person present tense.

A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible. A former curse and a present blessing.

Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse.

I AM ALIVE.

And with that, the ground shook like fury and every last remnant of the Midnight Library dissolved into dust.

Awakening

At one minute and twenty-seven seconds after midnight, Nora Seed marked her emergence back into life by vomiting all over her duvet.

Alive, but hardly.

Choking, exhausted, dehydrated, struggling, trembling, heavy, delirious, pain in her chest, even more pain in her head, this was the worst life could feel, and yet it was life, and life was precisely what she wanted.

It was hard, near impossible, to pull herself off the bed but she knew she had to get vertical.

She managed it, somehow, and grabbed her phone but it seemed too heavy and slippy to keep a grasp of and it fell onto the floor beyond view.

‘Help,’ she croaked, staggering out of the room.

Her hallway seemed to be tilting like it was a ship in a storm. But she reached the door without passing out, then dragged the chain lock off the latch and managed, after great effort, to open it.

‘Please help me.’

She barely realised it was still raining as she stepped outside in her vomit-stained pyjamas, passing the step where Ash had stood a little over a day before to announce the news of her dead cat.

There was no one around.

No one that she could see. So she staggered towards Mr Banerjee’s house in a series of dizzy stumbles and lurches, eventually managing to ring the doorbell.

A sudden square of light sprung out from the front window.

The door opened.

He wasn’t wearing his glasses and was confused maybe because of the state of her and the time of night.

‘I’m so very sorry, Mr Banerjee. I’ve done something very stupid. You’d better call an ambulance . . .’

‘Oh my lord. What on earth has happened?’

‘Please.’

‘Yes. I’ll call one. Right away . . .’

00:03:48

And that is when she allowed herself to collapse, forwards and with considerable velocity, right onto Mr Banerjee’s doormat.

The sky grows dark

The black over blue

Yet the stars still dare

To shine for you

The Other Side of Despair

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

It wasn’t raining any more.

She was inside and sitting in a hospital bed. She had been put on a ward and had eaten and was feeling a lot better. The medical staff were pleased, following her physical examination. The tender abdomen was to be expected, apparently. She tried to impress the doctor by telling her a fact Ash had told her, about a stomach lining renewing itself every few days.

Then a nurse came and sat on her bed with a clipboard and went through reams of questions relating to her state of mind. Nora decided to keep her experience of the Midnight Library to herself because she imagined that it wouldn’t go down too well on a psychiatric evaluation form. It was safe to surmise the little-known realities of the multiverse probably weren’t yet incorporated within the care plans of the National Health Service.

The questions and answers continued for what felt like an hour. They covered medication, her mother’s death, Volts, losing her job, money worries, the diagnosis of situational depression.

‘Have you ever tried anything like this before?’ the nurse asked.

‘Not in this life.’

‘And how do you feel right now?’

‘I don’t know. A bit strange. But I don’t want to die any more.’