Free Underground Rivers by Mike French

the ten year old son of Joan Frederick’s next door neighbour, disappeared while running an errand for his mother. He left the house to walk to the corner shop, a few hundred yards away and was never seen again. The story shocked the nation as these terrible stories tend to do and his mother, Lucy, who brings her other children into the library, has never lost that haunted, translucent look. My heart literally hurts whenever I see her.
    My mind wanders back to the books and it occurs to me that there may be another message in one of the other books Joan brought back yesterday. When I get to work in the morning I look up her previous books using the excuse of doing some junior shelving, a job we all put off until the return trolley is nearly toppling over, to find them. I quickly skim through them all.
    Nothing.
    What did I expect?
    I’m not sure, maybe an SOS from young Archie who has been kidnapped by Joan Fredericks and is being held in her cellar; a mirror image of the one I have, dark and sound proof, under my house.
    I can’t believe I am thinking this. I have to suppress a surge of envy for Joan when a colleague tells me she actually borrows the books for her grandson who has some sort of disability and rarely leaves the house. The disappointment many years ago in not producing boys was compounded when my twin girls announced in their late teens that they were gay so the chances of me having a grandson, able bodied or not is unlikely to happen. My job here at the library gives me lots of opportunities to mingle with children, which in some way compensates.
    I push away these unwelcome thoughts and think back to a year ago when I first experienced a strange incident at work. A book jumped off a tightly packed shelf in the junior section and at the time I laughed it off as just one of those things. When this started happening on a regular basis I looked inside the books and discovered pencil circling some of the words. Now anyone who works in a library will tell you that there is nothing more annoying than a book being returned with scribble in it but as there is no way to prove who committed this pointless act, you are left only with the feeble satisfaction of rubbing it out.
    I soon found that I was doing a lot of rubbing out.
    It took a while for me to see that there was a pattern to these strange messages and they actually meant something and for that I was led to my favourite book: my Thesaurus, with its derivations bursting out like bubbles from a single word. After a rough count I estimated at least 82 different meanings for the word free, 80 for escape and 48 for help. Were the circled words telling me something? Could it be some dubious crime committed years ago or something more recent; it seemed odd that it was always me that found them?
    I wonder now if I can find some answers in the old books we keep in the office and make a start by looking up the history of the building. It is common knowledge that it was originally an orphanage built in the early eighteenth century. Over the centuries it has mellowed like a beautiful old lady standing alone and graceful in a peaceful garden. Unusually, for a building from that era, it has large windows on each of the high walls which let in floods of sunlight. It seems an unlikely place for an orphanage; images of dark, old houses normally come to mind, grafted there from watching too many horror films. But the library I work in is a happy place and seems to welcome all. Never once have I felt any sort of foreboding, until now when these old sepia photos show a different picture to the reality of today. It looks dark and depressing and I feel a distinct chill as a further search brings up the original plans. I inspect them thoroughly before seeing to my surprise that there is a cellar beneath it all, but I have no idea where the entrance is and neither, it seems does Kate, the library manager. Up until now my colleagues have treated my tales of books telling me