Monday, October 16, 2017

Secret Basement Lab Alphabet: B is for BELFRY



B is for BELFRY

The bell in the church belfry across the street chimed seven o’clock. Ethan hadn’t been aware that the afternoon had been slipping by so quickly. At the last peal of seven, he stood from the too-short reading chair he’d been sitting in for the last three hours, engrossed in Edgar Wallace’s The Green Archer.  The molten sun of the afternoon had burned out for the day, tempering the evening sky a cast iron black, liberally salted with stars. There weren’t many visible from the library’s top floor; not inside with all of the lights and reflections, but he’d gaze at them in awe on his bike ride home.
And receive another stern lecture about letting someone know where he was and how late he was going to be there, no doubt. If anyone was at home to wonder, that is.
Ethan collected his books—Meet Mr. Mulliner by Wodehouse, The Compleat Werewolf by Anthony Boucher, the Wallace and Melville’s Typee­—and headed down to the checkout station. As he left the library and swung one leg over the seat of his bicycle, backpack cinched against his back for the ride home, he paused and looked back at one of the few refuges he had in his hometown, away from the bullies and condescending adults. One of the special places where adventures and humor and wisdom waited for him in pages, on shelves, like fruit on waiting limbs just ready for the picking. He was thankful for the two white stone lions lying sphinx-like on either side of the front steps, guarding the building and its magnificent domed glass roof and its glass second storey floors, where Dick Tracy and Zorro and island gods and great mariners and Haggard’s Quartermain and Maugham’s wry observations on the human condition and Chekov’s cynical anecdotes and Verne’s sense of parlor-tale adventure all collided and lived together in that proximity in peaceful cohabitation.

Great friends and great travels that he could engage whenever he wanted, wherever he may wander.

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