Chapter 1 Billy's Love of Books. Welcome to Hitchcock. It's an ordinary town of 250,000 people. When the town got started, in 1800, one of the first things its founders built was a beautiful public library so that people who couldn't afford to buy books could borrow them instead. Let's go inside. Under a large onion-shaped roof is a big reading room, where Hitchcock's older citizens look at newspapers and fall asleep. And there are miles and miles of wooden shelves and on them lots and lots of books. The Hitchcock town library has over twenty thousand books, many of which have never been read by anyone. One person who's read at least a hundred books in the library is the boy standing in Children's Literature. His name is Billy Shivers. If Billy Shivers were able to talk, he would say I'm very pleased to meet you, but this is a library, and if he did say anything, the librarian, Miss Junker, would make a cross, shushing noise, point at a large sign that reads silence and very probably remind him that there's no talking allowed in the library. So you'll forgive him if he just looks up from that book in his hands, smiles and nods back at you for now. Still, silence is golden and, in this case, it's useful, too. It allows you a chance to look at Billy and see what kind of a boy he is. The first thing you'll notice is that he's tall, and kind of pale-looking-even a bit sickly, like he's been ill or something. But that's only to be expected of someone who was in a serious car accident. Billy remembers very little about the accident, except that now he knows exactly what it feels like to be a thin layer of strawberry jam between two enormously thick slices of bread. Before the accident he was like any other boy his age, enjoying games and running around outside. But since the accident he doesn't do a lot of that. He gets tired very easily and doesn't care at all for loud noises. His eyes are more sensitive to sunlight, and he feels the cold more than he used to, so that he prefers being indoors to being outside. This probably helps to explain why Billy spends so much time in the Hitchcock Public Library. It's nice and warm there. That and the fact that he likes to read books. Lots of them. Billy had always loved books. But after the accident his love of books grew stronger than ever. He just couldn't get enough of them. He loved the way a book could transport you to a different place in the space of just a few pages, like it was a kind of taxicab for the mind. Sometimes he would take a book and find a quiet corner to sit down, and the next time he looked up, several hours would have passed. Reading a book could make him forget who and what he was and that he had ever been in an accident at all. Whatever subject you can choose, there's probably at least a hundred books that have been written about it. Billy could have remained in the library forever and he would never have run out of books to read, especially as the people of Hitchcock were always donating their books-most of them unread, of course. At first Billy's favorite books were all about horses. Then his favorite books were all about space. When he'd read dozens of books about this, he went on to read several more dozens of books about detectives and murder. Next he decided his favorite books were about magicians and wizards. Billy wasn't much interested in books about sports. He much preferred watching sports to reading about them. In the same week that he grew tired of reading about wizards, he tried reading books about cooking, mountaineering, jungle exploration, spying, lions, Scotland and the history of music. But none of these books struck him as being particularly interesting.