Listing to Port

1. There was a bookshop that left a crate of books in a damp, unattended cellar for a little too long, and the books went musty and feral. When the crate was finally levered open, a book on British Birds had eaten half the cover of a second edition of Peter Rabbit and a pair of vampire novels had sucked half the other books dry of words and were entwined in a suspiciously damp tangle of pages at the bottom of the box. The bookseller opened up one of the vampire novels and began reading, in hope of seeing if there was some way of retrieving the lost text.
2. By page 238 the vampires, who were languid lovers of elegance who largely obtained their blood off-page, were draping themselves over the mouldering couches of a vacant Los Angeles mansion. It was said to have been left abandoned after the death of a 106-year-old silent movie actress some years before; the true owner was a matter of legal contest, with the estate probably having been left to one of a number of nearly-identical cats. Although the mansion satisfied their craving for glamour, they were uncomfortable with its mirror-heavy decoration. During the daytime the sexier of the two would wander around the shuttered rooms, gazing at their deserted reflections and feeling only half-real. It seemed an odd choice of decor, given that the actress reportedly had had all obtainable trace of her image on screen destroyed. In puzzlement, he turned to her diary, which they had found under a floorboard when looking for a place to hide bones.
3. It was in the third year of the diary, sometime in the mid-60s, that the actress installed the mirrors. By this time she was well into her years of seclusion, and looking after her triplet granddaughters, who had been orphaned the previous year. She dreamed in those days of a house full of children, of laughter and midnight feasts and tears that always stopped when her comfort was offered. But there were never enough children. The mirrors helped her pretend somewhat. But behind everything the house remained, implacably cold and silent, untouched by the brief merriment of three rather melancholy toddlers. On Sundays they gathered in the blue parlour, which had been entirely lined with mirrors, and the actress read fairy stories to her infinitely reflected line.
4. The children were particularly fond of the story of a poor man’s daughter who put on the clothes of a boy and set out on the road through the great forest to find her fortune.  By and by she came to the castle of a horned queen, deep in a valley far from the official paths, and entered her service in exchange for protection from a following spirit that she had picked up on her travels. She was given a series of tasks to complete, including finding the queen’s mother’s heart, which had been buried beneath a flagstone, and counting the magpie spirits that came each morning to peck silver leaf from the castle gates, and negotiating with the creatures that used the bottom of the well as an entrance to this world. It seemed that she might inherit the castle if she was successful in all that was set her. But by the end of the tasks she did not want the castle. She asked instead for the Queen’s Book of Secrets, which she kept inside her pillow, and with the book she went down the well and was never seen again.
5. The Book of Secrets contained many things that were hardly known in that day and age. Perhaps it was a leftover from a more knowledgeable time. Though none of them were magic as such, they mainly concerned knowledge that would give one power over others, and devices that could be seen as magical by those who did not know their secrets. One page described how to make a clockwork man, perfect in every detail, and how to maintain the illusion that he was an independent servant (for, as specified in the book, the clockwork man could be made to do a single task, but not to change tasks). Many of these servants had been made in the past, but they had a tendency to outlive their usefulness and end up packed away for centuries. I hear tell that there was a bookshop once found one in a cellar and used him to shift books, but he was forever leaving them in the wrong place.