The Bods

 

One

 

This time, Aethelred was ready. He dimmed the glow lamp on top of his staff and scratched his long pointed ear, trying to work out how long he had been cramped into the tiny space – it seemed like forever, but Red (as most other Bods called him) knew it could only have been a short time at the most. He had carefully hidden himself inside a gap in the topmost bookshelf in Duke Humphrey’s Library, which sat majestically at the western most end of the Bodleian Library, as dawn slowly poured over the golden city of Oxford. The hiding place was perfect, the books on either side were large and - for now at least – quiet, calm and rested. It helped that he was only about as tall as a normal paperback book, which wasn’t too short for a Bod (sometimes Red got quite annoyed about his height - Red sometimes got quite annoyed about a lot of things that didn’t really matter).