The Last Star in the Reading Room

The painted stars on the ceiling of the town hall reading room had always glowed at nine o'clock. Nobody in town talked about it. People just lowered their voices. The old books on the shelves rustled their pages like sleepers turning over.

Then, one evening, the stars stayed dark.

Bo, the night caretaker, stood in the middle of the room with his keys in his hand. He looked up. The ceiling was only plaster and paint. Nothing moved on the shelves. The silence felt wrong, like a clock that had stopped ticking.

"It has never done this before," he said to himself.

"It has done it once," said a voice from the doorway.

Jasmin, the town librarian, came in with a stack of forms under her arm. She was the only person Bo knew who carried paperwork at nine at night. She stared at the ceiling and counted with one finger.

"Forty-one," she said. "There should be forty-two. Look at the corner above the window."

Bo looked. A pale round patch showed where a star used to be. The paint had flaked away, and the plaster underneath was bare and grey.

"The last star holds the others together," Jasmin said. "The old librarian told me that on my first day. I thought she was joking."

"Was she?"

"She was a very serious woman. I never heard her tell a joke."

Bo felt something small under his shoe. He bent down and picked up a yellow plastic star, the kind children stick on their bedroom ceilings. A curl of tape still hung from the back.

"Somebody's child dropped it," he said. "Maybe it will do."

"A sticker," Jasmin said. "For a ceiling that is two hundred years old."

"It's a star, isn't it? A star is a star."

Jasmin sighed, but she went to fetch the tall ladder from the cupboard.

"First we have to charge it," Bo said. "These stickers drink light. My nephew has about thirty of them."

They carried the sticker to the biggest reading lamp. They held it under the bulb for ten whole minutes. Jasmin timed it on her watch. She did not look hopeful. Bo kept turning the star over, as if it were a coin he wanted to polish.

When the ten minutes ended, they switched off the lamp. The sticker glowed a soft green in the dark. Bo grinned.

"There," he said. "I told you."

He climbed the ladder, pressed the sticker onto the bare patch and held it there with his thumb. For a moment the whole corner of the ceiling shone green. Then the light faded, quickly, like a breath on a window. After half a minute the sticker was only a pale yellow shape again. The other forty-one stars stayed dark.

"Well," Jasmin said. "That went exactly as I expected."

"You expected it to fail?"

"I expected it to be a sticker."

Bo came down the ladder slowly. He felt a little foolish, but he did not want to give up.

"Maybe it needs more light," he said. "Maybe ten minutes was too short."

"If we give it an hour, it will glow for an hour. That will not fix the ceiling." Jasmin put her forms on a table and sat down. "Think, Bo. In two hundred years, nobody has charged these stars with a lamp. So what does this room want?"

Bo thought about all the evenings he had spent here. He remembered the regular readers in the corners and the schoolchildren with their homework. He remembered the man who read the newspaper out loud to nobody.

"People used to come here at night," he said slowly. "Not only to borrow books. They read here. Out loud, sometimes, just a page or two."

"The reading evenings," Jasmin said, and she sat up straight. "We stopped them last spring, because the council needed the hall for storage."

"And the stars have been getting weaker ever since."

"I told myself it was the old paint." Jasmin looked at the dark ceiling for a long moment. "What if the stars do not need light at all? What if they need someone to read to them?"

"It sounds silly."

"We just tried to charge a plastic star under a lamp. I think we are past silly."

She went to the nearest shelf and pulled out a thick book of travel stories. She found a chair for Bo and put a second chair beside it. Then she turned off every lamp in the room, except the small one on her table.

"You go first," she said.

"I am a terrible reader."

"Then the stars will be easy to impress."

Bo opened the book. His voice sounded strange in the empty room, thin and a little too loud. He read about a ship that crossed a wide sea. The cook counted the sailors every morning, because one of them kept disappearing. Halfway down the page he reached the word Mediterranean. He stopped, tried it twice and said it wrong both times.

Above him, something flickered.

Bo stopped reading. Jasmin pointed, without a word. High in the corner by the door, one painted star had started to glow. It was faint and silver, like a window far away.

"Keep going," she whispered.

He kept going. When the page ended, Jasmin took the book and read the next one in her clear, careful voice. A second star lit up, and then a third. They did not come all at once. They woke the way people wake in a house, one after another, with long pauses between.

By the fifth page, Bo had stopped worrying about his voice. By the tenth, he had stopped watching the ceiling and was simply enjoying the story. The cook was hiding the missing sailor in the kitchen. The man was too frightened to go on deck. Bo laughed out loud at that. The whole ceiling brightened, as if the room had laughed with him.

Around them the books began to rustle. A page turned on the top shelf. Another one answered it from the far wall. The sound was soft and busy, like a crowd settling into seats before a show.

"Look," Jasmin said, and her voice shook a little. "Look at the window."

The yellow sticker was glowing again. It was not the thin green light from the lamp. It was a warm, steady silver, exactly the same as the painted stars around it. It seemed to belong there. Forty-one stars and one plastic one hung together in the dark. No one could have told which was which.

"The forty-second," Bo said.

"The room accepted it." Jasmin shook her head slowly. "Two hundred years of careful painting, and the missing piece was something from a toy shop."

"We should read here every evening."

"We will. I will tell the council the reading evenings are back. If they want the hall for storage, they can store their boxes somewhere that does not have stars."

She picked up her forms and found a pen. She wrote a line at the bottom of the top page. Bo leaned over her shoulder to read it.

Missing star replaced. Cost: fifty pence. Salary: none.

"Salary?" he asked.

"If a new employee works nights, the council will want to know what we pay him." Jasmin smiled. "I think they will be very happy with the answer."

Bo looked up at the small yellow star, shining quietly among the old ones.

"It is the only worker in town who never asks for a day off," he said.