The Grimoire of Kensington Market Read online

  About This Book

  The downtown core of Toronto is being consumed by elysium, a drug that allows its users to slip through the permeable edges of this world into the next before consuming them utterly. Peddled by the icy Srebrenka, few have managed to escape the drug and its dealer. But Maggie has.

  Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” and woven through with northern folk tales, The Grimoire of Kensington Market is the story of Maggie, proprietor of the Grimoire bookstore, the cosmic nexus of all the world’s tales. Years after beating her addiction, Maggie is dismayed by the reappearance of Srebrenka in her life. Although she resists temptation, she quickly learns that her brother Kyle has been ensnared by Srebrenka’s drug-laced beguiling.

  Driven by guilt and love, Maggie sets off on a quest to rescue Kyle from the Silver World, where robbers stalk the woods, where tavern keepers weave clouds to hide mountains and where caribou race along the northern lights. There, she must discover what hidden strengths still lie within her.

  Praise for Lauren B. Davis

  “Richly layered. It’s not just a compelling story, but also a treatise on the idea of fighting back when one’s beliefs are challenged from every direction. The way one’s ideals might survive in an ever-changing world, as imperative now as it was thousands of years ago, is at the crux of this expertly rendered parable.”

  – Globe & Mail on Against a Darkening Sky

  “Set against an otherworldly, intimate backdrop, Davis’s tale vividly brings to life a near-mythic period of British history while speaking to universal human experience.”

  – Publishers Weekly on Against a Darkening Sky

  “Against a Darkening Sky is told in the clear, uncluttered prose that characterizes Davis’s other work … Never a false note is struck in Davis’s detailing of Anglo-Saxon life … The struggles of a steadfast pagan woman and a fearful monk [are] captivating and entertaining.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press on Against a Darkening Sky

  “Davis heartbreakingly renders the disturbed thought process of someone trapped in addiction.”

  – Quill & Quire on The Empty Room

  “An entirely accurate portrait of alcoholism … [It] is very real, and it is believable … Davis is without a doubt an exceptionally talented writer.”

  – Globe & Mail on The Empty Room

  “Davis’ novel is raw and disturbing, yet we keep reading, spurred by the clarity of the writing and intensity of the description. Davis offers a completely believable picture of one woman’s decline and helplessness … As a writer, Davis has the rare ability to mine her own experience and create fiction from what she palpably understands. It is an enviable talent and her novel allows those of us who have never been there to grasp the hell of being an addict, of how sorry things can get when we waste our lives … [A] great psychological portrait of a woman under the influence.”

  – Toronto Star on The Empty Room

  “A stark, beautiful, sad, and frankly terrifying novel. Our Daily Bread is finely crafted, with careful attention to characterization, style, and pacing. It succeeds on every level.”

  – Quill & Quire starred review on Our Daily Bread

  “Engrossing and convincing. Davis’s question here is … how can human beings look into a heart of darkness … and crawl back to the light again?”

  – Quill & Quire starred review on The Radiant City

  “A cohesive, beautiful, and stunningly realistic portrait of life on the fringes of the City of Light, far away from the haute couture and tourist destinations that fiction about Paris is known for … While the book certainly delves deeply into the trauma of war – and Davis should be commended on her excellent research on the subject – The Radiant City is at the heart a novel about recapturing a sense of wonder and belonging. At times it reads like an extended meditation on the value of existence, set in the midst of a city within which, just by walking around, one can see the extremes of human nature.”

  – Paris Voice on The Radiant City

  “The Stubborn Season is precise, polished … [It] bind[s] the attention through the excellence of its sharp, precise prose, generously laced with authentic history. Davis’s astute psychological observations render the two main characters insistently real … The Stubborn Season raises the bar for first novels.”

  – The Montreal Gazette on The Stubborn Season

  “Well researched and crisply written … Davis’s talent is unmistakable

  … she evokes with harrowing precision … Margaret is one of the most memorable characters I have encountered in contemporary Canadian fiction … Davis’s portrayal of Depression survivors shows the human spirit can be amazingly strong and resilient.”

  – National Post on The Stubborn Season

  ALSO BY LAUREN B. DAVIS

  Against a Darkening Sky

  The Empty Room

  Our Daily Bread

  The Radiant City

  Rat Medicine and Other Unlikely Curatives

  The Stubborn Season

  An Unrehearsed Desire

  THE

  GRIMOIRE

  OF

  KENSINGTON MARKET

  LAUREN B. DAVIS

  To R.E.D. The road always led to you.

  Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

  — C.S. Lewis

 

  Contents

  Cover

  About This Book

  Praise for Lauren B. Davis

  Also by Lauren B. Davis

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  PEOPLE DIDN’T WANDER INTO THE GRIMOIRE.

  It wasn’t that sort of bookshop. People found it by some force even Maggie, the proprietor, didn’t understand. If one was meant to find the shop, one did, otherwise it was unnoticeable. Alvin, the nephew of the former proprietor, Mr. Mustby, came as he pleased, as did Mr. Strundale, who ran the Wort & Willow Apothecary a few doors down, but on the other hand, Maggie’s brother, Kyle, had never found his way, and she wasn’t about to invite him.

  Located at the front of the ground floor of an old house, the shop smelled of old paper, glue and wax, with slight undernotes of mildew and mice. It was full of books, as one might expect, but not just full of books in the general way of bookshops. Rather, it was full of books so that walking from the door to the corner where Maggie sat behind her desk was like navigating a maze. There were books on the shelves, books on t
he tables, books precariously balanced on the top of forgotten teacups on the aforementioned tables, books on the windowsills, books on the chairs, books piled on the floor shoulder high, if you were tall, over your head, if you were short.

  This morning Maggie, dressed in her usual black turtleneck and jeans, sat behind her desk, which had legs carved with dragons, and their clawed feet gripped marble globes. Across the edge of the desk, piles of books formed a sort of rampart, inside which were a scatter of items: a small saucer of stones and shells, an assortment of small creatures – a wooden mouse reading a bible, a rhinoceros-nosed dragon carved from coal lying on its back reading a book, a winged gargoyle, a crystal owl, a jade turtle – several candles scented with frankincense, a brass lamp and a very large nearly empty teacup, decorated with a blue narwhal. Maggie held a dark blue book with three silver moons embossed on the cover, in the waxing, full and waning aspects. As often happened when a book caught her eye, it was just what she hadn’t known she was looking for. She ran her long pale fingers over the artwork. It triggered a memory of last night’s dream. Something about a man cast away on the moon. The first story was about an old man who stole a bundle of firewood and then refused to give it to a freezing beggar. As punishment for the hardness of his heart more than the theft, the wind whisked him to the moon, where he waited for Judgment Day. He said he didn’t mind. It could have been worse, for the moon only showed itself at night and so his shame would be seen only half the time.

  “Huh,” she said and fiddled with one of the two silver bird charms pinned in the honey-coloured braid that fell over her shoulder. She wore no makeup; they were her only concession to vanity. Several golden lights flashed, the size of the fairy lights people sometimes hung in gardens, and Maggie noticed two shelves, one housing stories about Syrian immigrants and the other stories of sub-Saharan Africa, lengthened just a tad.

  Such was the way new additions to the shop were announced. Some days the shop seemed to sparkle, so many books appeared, other days a few flickers and nothing more. One would think that such a bookshop would eventually burst through its walls, since more and more stories appear in the world, and therefore in the Grimoire, every hour, with shelves expanding to accommodate each one, but it is a sad truth that stories also leave the world when they are forgotten, or when the last teller of the tale has died. When this happened, a small flame appeared above the book in question and as it burned, the book itself dimmed, lost its shape and, when the flame snuffed out, so did the book. In this way, although the inside of the shop expanded or contracted to fit the world’s tales, it was always the perfect size.

  Badger, the shaggy black-and-white mixed-breed dog curled near Maggie’s feet, looked up and cocked his head, one ear flopping. He whined. Maggie scratched his ear. She turned the page. A very old tale. In one version God exiled the thief to his choice of either sun or moon. In another the wind made him spend eternity repairing hedgerows on the night’s silver disk. No one gave the old man a chance to explain or offer a defence. Maybe he was freezing himself. Maybe he had sick children at home. He had no advocate; no one on his side. Maggie snorted. Wasn’t that always the case? It was so easy to judge, to punish; so hard to find justice; and mercy never seemed to enter the picture at all.

  She closed the book with a thump, causing a puff of dust to explode heavenward, and pushed it away. She slurped up the last of the tea and then went into the kitchen at the back of the shop to make more. While the kettle heated she let Badger out the back door into the stone-walled garden. Within it was a seat under an old oak tree, and rose bushes, lilacs, camellias and hollyhocks that filled the entire shop with fragrance when in bloom. Now, in late October, the garden was quiet and still, falling asleep at the approach of winter. Maggie stood in the doorway and watched Badger sniff around. She thought how Mr. Mustby, the shop’s previous proprietor, the man who had saved her life, had loved mornings and how she’d often found him in the garden when she got up, a coffee in one hand, a book in the other, sitting on the bench under the tree. Three months after his sudden death she fancied she still saw him there.

  A few minutes later she was back at her desk, sipping her steaming tea. She tapped her fingers on the moon-story book. Something to learn, certainly, from last night’s dream. But what? Well, time would tell. She’d almost grown accustomed to dreaming in fairy tales. As a child, the dreams had been vague, mere snippets of glass mountains, talking frogs and handless maidens. But when she lost herself to the drug elysium all that changed. The boundaries grew thin. Dreams were no longer dreams; they were journeys into the Silver World, the World Beside This One. What was real and what wasn’t blended. Fairy tales, holy myths, ancient figures from the imaginations of a million dreamers … they were as real as the hand at the end of one’s arm. That was the deadly lure of the elysium. And even though she’d put down the pipe three years ago, her dreams had never returned to their pre-addiction vagueness. Perhaps she’d always had some genetic predisposition.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. It was exhausting, as was the grief she was experiencing after Mr. Mustby’s recent death. No one ever talked about that. Pain she expected, but this fatigue! Her eyes burned. She didn’t want to cry anymore. Maggie tilted her head and rolled her neck, trying to work out the cricks.

  The little bell sounded over the door. Badger whined and stood. Alvin, maybe? Maggie’s hands went to her hair, but she stopped herself. She hadn’t seen Alvin in several days and although she didn’t like to admit it, she missed him. More fool, she! Alvin, Mr. Mustby’s nephew, who’d once inhabited the second-floor room she now called her own, lived on a charter boat docked in Lake Ontario. Sometimes he took out people to scatter the ashes of loved ones, sometimes wedding parties. If he knew how often she thought about him when he was gone, he’d only tease her.

  Badger sat back down. Not Alvin, then.

  A moment later a woman’s face popped round one of the shelves. “Hello?” she said. “Quite a store you’ve got here.” She was probably in her fifties, with grey hair cut in soft wisps around her face.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  The woman adjusted her turquoise-framed glasses. “Oh, what a sweet dog!” Badger trotted over and leaned against the woman’s camel-hair coat in a position for ear scratches. The woman obliged and said to Maggie, “It’s funny, I’ve never noticed this place before. Have you been here long?”

  “Quite a while, but we don’t really advertise.”

  The woman scanned the crowded shelves that went on, row after row, much farther than the laws of physics ought to permit. “What an odd place.”

  This happened when customers came in; they seemed befuddled, but it didn’t last. Maggie concluded long ago that this was part of the spell of the Grimoire – a just-below-the-surface-of-consciousness reassurance people felt when they crossed the threshold.

  “I like it though,” the woman said. “Anyway, I was walking past and suddenly remembered a dream I had last night. Sounds crazy, I know, but …”

  “Doesn’t sound crazy at all,” said Maggie. “I was just pondering a dream I had last night myself.”

  The woman cocked her head as though trying to recall. “I’m not sure, but there was something about, I know this sounds strange, but a lily and a snake, something about men dressed in blue flames.” The woman looked over Maggie’s shoulder. “Could have sworn I just saw fireflies or something over there.”

  “Lights under the rim of the shelves. Darn things are always flickering. Bad connection.”

  Maggie took the woman by the arm and led her to the back of the store, to a great wall of small wooden drawers containing index cards upon which were recorded, in a beautiful calligraphy drawn by an unknown hand, all the titles of the books, their authors and a brief description, cross-referenced and updated as books came and went. “I think I know a book you might like. Goethe, of all people, wrote a fascinating story called
‘The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.’ It’s considered one of the great symbolic enigmas of world literature.” She rifled through the cards. “This one. It’s in his book Tales for Transformation.”

  “You know, that sounds right somehow. God knows I’m going through enough transformations right now – divorce, retirement, you don’t want to know – and everything feels enigmatic. Might give me some food for thought.”

  “Follow me.” Maggie found the book and handed it to the woman.

  “You won’t know what it all means until you read it. But it’s not that unusual. You’d be surprised how many people come in here asking for books based on their dreams.”

  “Looks awfully old.”

  “Not so old. Nineteen-thirties, I think. First edition of the English translation.”

  The woman went to hand it back to Maggie. “I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

  “I bet you can. How much would you like to pay?”

  The woman blinked. “Gee, I don’t know … forty dollars?”

  “I think you were meant for this book.”

  * * *

  AT NOON, BADGER AND MAGGIE TOOK THEIR USUAL constitutional along the crowded, noisy streets of Kensington Market. Opening the door was always a slightly unsettling moment. Behind the doors the world of the bookstore was hushed, calm, as though out of time entirely, and the street noises didn’t penetrate. Stepping out into the world of brightly coloured Victorian houses, the Wort & Willow Apothecary her friend Mr. Strundale owned, riotous second-hand clothing stores, cars and taxis – drivers leaning on their horns – bicycle couriers whooshing by, coffee shops and open-air vegetable markets, which even in winter filled the air with a note of overripe fruit and decay, was a bit like stepping through the looking glass. They walked past Kensington Market’s Italian pasta shops and espresso bars, Chinese herbal dispensaries and French cheese shops. The sidewalk was crowded with people speaking English, Arabic, Portuguese, Cantonese, Somali – it seemed like seven or eight different languages at once – and no one paid the least bit of attention to either Maggie or Badger. The air was damp and chill and the few trees were leafless. An empty paper cup danced along the sidewalk in a gust of wind.