Tides of the Sunken Library

On the island of Saltmere, everybody knew the story of the drowned library.

A hundred years ago, the story went, Saltmere had the most beautiful library in the whole world. It stood on the rocks at the edge of the bay, with a green copper roof and round windows like portholes, and it held every book that had ever been written about the sea. Sailors came from a thousand miles away to read its charts. Scientists came to read its studies of fish and whales and currents. Children came to read its stories of mermaids and sea monsters and pirate queens.

And then, one stormy night, the sea rose up and swallowed it whole. The library sank beneath the waves, and it never came back.

"That's the story, anyway," said Kofi Mensah, lying on his stomach on the harbor wall and staring down at the water. "Grandma says it's just a fairy tale. She says there was probably never a library at all."

"Your grandma," said his cousin June, "also says seaweed is delicious."

"It is delicious."

"It's slimy, Kofi."

Kofi was ten. June was eleven, which she mentioned roughly every twenty minutes. She had come from the mainland to spend the summer on Saltmere with Kofi's family, and so far she had spent most of it complaining about the wind, the rain, the lack of shops, and the smell of fish. But she had also, Kofi had noticed, spent every single evening sitting on the harbor wall with him, looking at the sea.

That evening, the sea was doing something strange.

It was going out. Further and further. Further than Kofi had ever seen it go. The fishing boats in the harbor settled onto the mud. The rocks at the mouth of the bay rose up out of the water, dark and shining and covered in weed. Crabs scuttled across sand that had not seen the sky in years. And still the sea kept going, pulling back and back, until the whole bay was a great wet plain of sand and pools and seaweed, glittering orange in the sunset.

"Is it supposed to do that?" asked June nervously.

Kofi's grandmother had come out of the house behind them. She was very old and very small and wore a knitted hat all year round, even in summer. She stood beside them on the harbor wall with her hands on her hips.

"Lowest tide in a hundred years," she said. "The moon's closer than it's been for a century. My grandmother saw one like this when she was a girl." She paused, and Kofi saw something in her face that he had never seen before. Something like fear. "It was the night the library sank."

And that was when June pointed at the middle of the bay and said, in a very small voice, "Kofi. What's that?"

Out on the wet sand, where there should have been nothing but mud and weed, the top of a green copper roof was sticking up out of a pool of water. And beside it, winding down into the dark, was a staircase.