Jackaby (Jackaby, #1)

by William Ritter

“I have ceased concerning myself with how things look to others, Abigail Rook. I suggest you do the same. In my experience, others are generally wrong.”

Rows of books reached to the ceiling and lined the walls of a beautiful library. Central bookshelves had been arranged to allow light to pour down the aisles from alcove window seats, and the space felt warm and comfortable. I could have spent hours curled up on a soft chair in that room,

Mr. Jackaby's library

It wasn’t that I did not believe in ghosts; it was that I believed in them in the same noncommittal way that I believed in giant squids or lucky coins or Belgium. They were things that probably existed, but I had never had any occasion to really care one way or another. I had never given ghosts much thought—except, perhaps, as a frightened child gazing into shadows at bedtime. Jackaby, I was rapidly discovering, had a way of opening that corner of my brain. It was a quiet little corner in which I had lived when I was younger. It was a corner in which anything was possible, where magic was not an improbable daydream, but an obvious fact—if still only just out of reach. In those days I had known there must be monsters in the world, but I would happily accept them, knowing that, by the same logic, there must also be wizards and wands and flying carpets. I had never really closed that part of my mind, just slowly stopped visiting it as I grew older. I had left it unlocked like the jumbled treasure room upstairs, waiting for someone to come poking about.

That the battles are usually in her head does not lessen the bravery of it. The hardest battles always are.”

“Monsters are easy, Miss Rook. They’re monsters. But a monster in a suit? That’s basically just a wicked man, and a wicked man is a more dangerous thing by far.”

I wondered which was sadder, leaving someone to cry after you when you were gone, or not having anyone who would miss you in the first place.

But that’s Jackaby in a nutshell. Science and magic, beauty and bedlam, things that ought to be at odds—they just don’t follow the same rules when Jackaby’s involved. For all his faults, he really is a remarkable man.”

“The waist cinches up in the back, and there are pockets sewn into the hem, here and here.” Jenny gestured to the skirt. Pockets! I was thrilled. I have never understood the aversion to pockets in ladies’ fashion—as though it has become some great shame to appear as if one might actually need to possess anything.

Ignorance is bliss, is that it?” “That’s insipid. Happiness is bliss—but ignorance is anesthetic,

This world is full of dragon-slayers. What we need are a few more people who aren’t too proud to listen to a fish.”

Jackaby bustled off down the hall. In the distance I could hear him calling, “Jenny! Have you seen that saucepan? The one from that set your grandmother left you?” “You mean the one you riddled with buckshot dents last month?” came the spirit’s muffled reply. “Or the one you melted last summer with that alchemy nonsense?” “The first one!”