The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase

by Greg Cox

  Dog-eared birth registries and census reports were piled atop the desk, while multiple windows were open on the screen of her laptop. Virtual marriage licenses and baptism records shared the screen with popular Web sites designed for tracing one’s ancestry. Names and dates poured into Cassandra’s brain from multiple sources, nourishing the hallucinatory family tree unfolding before her. She reached out to prune one branch that had come to a dead end during the late 1950s. Using her fingers as scissors, she snipped it off.

  “Sorry.” Baird backed off. “Just do your thing. I know you’ve got this.”

  Cassandra appreciated the vote of confidence. She did her best to tune out any outside distractions in order to fully immerse herself in the task at hand. The other Librarians were conducting their own research in and around the office, while Jenkins had excused himself to check on various nursery-rhyme-related papers and relics. Her gaze ascended from the base of the family tree to its upper reaches, which had proliferated at a geometric rate over the generations. Malthusian calculations danced around her head, pealing like church bells, as a slow-motion population explosion scattered Mother Goose’s descendants hither and yon. Time and circumstances had cropped off a few tree limbs, making her task a little easier, but that still left plenty more branches to account for. Her mind reeling, Cassandra found herself sympathizing with a certain old woman who lived in a shoe; there were just so many children she didn’t know what to do.

  Did Mother Goose have to take her title quite so literally?

  “Wanna bet I get there first?” Ezekiel asked. Lounging in an easy chair on the other side of the office, he swiped through various apps and Web sites on his phone. “My hacking against Cassandra’s superbrain?”

  “You’re on.” Stone leafed through an illustrated collection of Mother Goose rhymes from the nineteenth century as he sat at the conference table. “Loser has to clean up after the goats on Level Four.”

  “I’ll get in on that action,” Baird said, joining them. “No offense, Jones, but this job is right in Cassandra’s wheelhouse. Tracing patterns and seeing connections is what she does best.”

  “Maybe. Probably,” Ezekiel said breezily, as though his ego wasn’t too invested in the wager. “Just trying to keep things interesting, you know?”

  Boredom was Ezekiel’s archenemy, which he often claimed was his only reason for accepting the Library’s job offer in the first place.

  Cassandra wasn’t sure she entirely believed that. Despite the attitude he strove to project, Ezekiel always came through when they needed him most. Still, if he really thought he could beat her at unraveling Mother Goose’s convoluted family tree, he was fooling himself in a big way. Shaking off her earlier fatigue, Cassandra dove back into the challenge with renewed determination. Her slender hands made rapid passes in the air, picking up the pace.

  Game on, Jones.

  Cassandra felt like a professional tree trimmer as she mercilessly snipped away at dead branches while trying to shape the sprawling family tree into something manageable. Identifying all of Elizabeth Goose’s disparate descendants was only half the battle; the really tricky part was finding some kind of worthwhile leads in the ever-expanding family tree. By Cassandra’s calculations, Mother Goose’s family had multiplied by several orders of magnitude since the 1700s; they could be looking at thousands of potential suspects, assuming there even were specific individuals at fault in this case. Just trying to narrow the names down to a workable list amounted to pruning an immense family tree down to a few particular branches. She was half-tempted to ask that unusually lucky tree trimmer in Miami for some tips.…

  Hang on, she thought. What was that guy’s name again?

  Inspiration rang like cymbals in her head. Playing a hunch, she consulted her personal Clippings Book, then glanced back at the topmost branches of the Goose family tree. A single name suddenly stood out among the others, glowing incandescently now that she knew what to look for.

  “George Cole,” she whispered. “Got you!”

  Her excitement did not escape Baird’s attention. “What is it, Red? Have you got something?”

  “I think so.” Cassandra called out to the other Librarians. “Quick, what are the names of the individuals in your clippings?”

  Ezekiel answered first, bringing it up on his phone. “Mary Simon, of Who Cares, Ohio.”

  Cassandra scanned the top of the family tree. Another name brightened before her gaze. Her goose bumps got bumpier.

  “Found her!” She glanced urgently at Stone. “Next?”

  He flipped to the end of his pocket-sized scrapbook. “Dr. Gillian Fell of Northumberland, England.” He paused and scratched his head. “Hold on. Where do I know that name from?”

  “It’s right here!” Cassandra pointed excitedly at an illuminated name, forgetting for a moment that nobody else could see it. “It all fits. Every one of the ‘victims’ in the clippings is a direct descendant of Mother Goose!”

  “And a possible heir to the title?” Baird theorized. “Maybe someone is trying to take out the competition?”

  “Or perhaps hostilities have already broken out between the various factions?” Stone said. “The Mother Goose Wars heating up again?”

  “Also a possibility,” Baird conceded. “In any event, great work, Cassandra. I knew we could count on you.”

  “Thanks.” Cassandra powered down. With a sweep of her hand, she collapsed the illusory family tree to give her eyes (and her brain) a rest. Her wayward senses stabilized, falling back into their usual boxes. The ordinary sounds and smells of the Library replaced any more exotic perceptions. “Sorry I didn’t see the connections more quickly.”

  “No need to apologize, Cassie. You did good.” Stone smirked at Ezekiel. “You lose, pal. Get ready to pay up.”

  Ezekiel sighed and put away his phone. “I was almost there, really, but … whatever. Way to go, Cassandra.” He flashed a disarming smile at her. “Just wait until next time.”

  “Oh, I will.” She grinned back at him. “Bring it.”

  “So now what?” Stone asked. “Do we split up to investigate all of these incidents?”

  “That appears to be what the Library has in mind.” Baird laid out their battle plan. “Each of you check out your respective clippings. I’ll take that defunct Mother Goose amusement park, while Jenkins mans the home front as usual. We can compare notes once we’ve got some firsthand intel to share.”

  Cassandra closed her books and stepped away from the computer. “Looks like I’m heading to Miami then.” She generally preferred it when the team stayed together, but it made sense to split up this time. “Too bad Flynn isn’t around to help out on this case.”

  “Tell me about it,” Baird said.

  5

  New Jersey

  Once upon a time, Mother Goose’s Magic Garden had delighted generations of children and their parents with its shady, sylvan setting and charming, life-sized re-creations of classic nursery rhymes. Researching the bygone park on the Internet, Baird had turned up assorted postcards and family photos of the Garden in its heyday, when the attractions were freshly painted and the paths and gardens scrupulously maintained, and beaming visitors had been able to wander the winding wooded trails past life-sized fiberglass facsimiles of Little Bo Peep, Wee Willie Winkie, the Man in the Moon, and company. Wooden cottages, picket fences, and brightly blooming flower beds added to the colorful tableaux on display.

  Times had changed, however.

  Dipping attendance, bankruptcy, abandonment, vandalism, and decay had taken its toll on the once-thriving park, which had officially closed its doors over a decade before. Weeds clotted the overgrown paths and gardens. Peeling paint exposed rusty metal and rotting wood. Graffiti defaced crumbling snack bars and picnic tables. Simple Simon’s head rested at the foot of his decapitated body. A spray painted “anarchy” symbol tagged Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet. Broken window shutters had fallen off the House That Jack Built. Old Mother Hubbard’s paint job had
been stripped as bare as her cupboard. Creeping moss had turned Little Boy Blue green. The Three Little Kittens had lost their footing as well as their mittens, having toppled over into the underbrush. Pond scum coated the stagnant pool surrounding the Three Wise Men of Gotham who had gone to sea in a bowl. Autumn leaves littered the ground, leaving the trees bare and skeletal. Here and there a bright spot of color had survived time and the elements, hinting at the park’s once-festive appearance, but the contrast only made the general dilapidation more glaring. An overcast sky added to the melancholy atmosphere. A John Deere bulldozer was parked by the wreckage, awaiting the demolition crew.

  “Nope,” Baird muttered. “This isn’t creepy at all.”

  The Annex’s Magic Door had allowed her to bypass the chain-link fence enclosing the condemned park. She had merely stepped through the doorway and, accompanied by a flash of white light and the crackle of eldritch energy, emerged from the front door of a gargantuan wooden shoe. Crossing from Portland to New Jersey meant that it was now past noon, local time, making a long night feel even longer. Faded “No Trespassing” signs, posted on tree trunks and a few surviving fence posts, had not deterred her from exploring the forlorn remains of the park. Broken bottles and empty beer cans suggested that the deserted locale had inevitably attracted its fair share of partying teenagers over the years, but as far as she could tell she currently had the ruins to herself. She kept her guard up, however, since it never hurt to keep sharp while on a mission. Her surroundings looked safe enough, if a trifle depressing, but the Clippings Book had alerted the Librarians to this site for a reason, so there was bound to be something amiss.

  Best not to take chances, she thought. Magic can be a minefield.

  After taking a few moments to get her bearings, she got down to business and unclipped a device hooked to her belt: a handheld scanner designed to detect magical energy or its residue. The device resembled a steampunk egg beater with four gleaming steel spheres at the end of its probes. Cassandra, who was forever tinkering with the detector to improve its accuracy and reliability, had tried to explain to Baird how exactly the device worked, but most of it had flown over Baird’s head. Dirty bombs and tactical maneuvers Baird understood; “etheric subfrequencies” and “transcendental ectoplasmic connectivity” had not been part of her NATO training.

  Just as long as it works in the field, she thought.

  She flipped the On switch and the detector powered up. An analog gauge registered a higher than usual level of background magical radiation. As Baird understood it, there was more “wild magic” at loose in the world than there had been a few years ago, thanks to the sinister machinations of a certain Serpent Brotherhood, but she thought the devices had been recalibrated to compensate for that. She reset the counter to zero, just to be sure, but got the same readings again. Mother Goose’s Magic Garden was living up to its name.

  She made a mental note to check to see if the park was at a juncture of mystical ley lines when she got back to the Library, where there was a globe charting the placement of the various natural magical “jet streams.” In the meantime, she used the scanner like a Geiger counter to try to locate where the ambient magic was strongest. Higher readings to the east led her down an overgrown path heading deeper into the park.

  It was not an easy trek. Nature was busily reclaiming the path, which barely qualified as such anymore, forcing her to duck beneath overhanging tree branches and stomp through thick underbrush at times, so that Baird found herself wishing that she had brought hiking boots—and a machete. Random debris, strewn about the park, further obstructed the way. A quaint wooden cottage, formerly belonging to Jack Sprat and his wife, had collapsed into a heap of rotting timbers and rusty nails. Broken lengths of rebar jutted from the debris. Discarded garden tools—spades, hoes, and rakes—waited to trip the unwary. Baird stepped carefully, leery of potential pitfalls buried in the bushes. She found herself trying to remember the last time she’d had a tetanus shot.…

  The detector’s probes whirred, spinning ever faster, as climbing readings led her past more evidence of the park’s deterioration. The Dish and the Spoon, once posed in the act of running away with each other, now lay on opposite sides of the path, half-buried beneath weeds and fallen leaves. Little Jack Horner’s corner had apparently burned to the ground; Baird suspected smoking trespassers or an unauthorized campfire were to blame. All that remained was a charred door frame where a blackened wooden door was barely hanging on by its hinges. Jack and Jill’s well had tumbled down its hill, becoming nothing more than a pile of rubble at the bottom of a grassy slope that looked as though it hadn’t been mown since MySpace was hot.

  The needle on the gauge edged toward the yellow zone, raising her concern. If the detector had been registering actual radiation, instead of the magical variety, she’d expect to be entering Chernobyl by now. Instead, she rounded a blind corner, pushing past a curtain of hanging branches, to discover … Humpty Dumpty.

  As one might expect, he lay shattered at the bottom of a moldy brick wall. His head, which consisted of a large fiberglass egg with a friendly, smiling face painted on it, had cracked down the middle and was now in two pieces, with one eye and half a smile on each fragment. Both halves had also broken off from the rest of his body, which remained sitting atop the wall. One hand was still raised to greet approaching visitors.

  Three pieces, Baird thought to herself with a grunt. It’s always three, Jenkins said.

  At first, she wasn’t sure if Humpty was supposed to be lying in pieces or not, but then she remembered an old postcard that had shown the figure sitting happily intact on his wall, sometime prior to his celebrated fall. Makes sense, Baird thought. You wouldn’t want to upset small children by showing a Humpty after his spill. She wondered if the damage to the mannequin had been caused by time and neglect, or if some visiting vandal had possessed a poetic sense of mischief.

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” she recited, “couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

  There was no evidence of men or horses, sculpted or otherwise, but the excess magical energy registered as stronger here than anywhere else. Baird slowly circled the shattered egg man, scanning it with the detector. The probes whirred at an alarming rate; the needle swung much farther to the right. The readings she got from Humpty were practically off the charts; he was all but glowing with magic.

  Ground zero?

  She backed away from Humpty, reluctant to touch him or even get too close. That she had located the heart of the mystery at Mother Goose’s Garden she had no doubt; what exactly her discovery meant was anybody’s guess. She could only hope that Jenkins or her Librarians could make sense of it. Once again, she wished that Flynn was available. Unlike the new Librarians, each of whom had their own individual specialties, Flynn was more of an all-around genius, who often seemed to know a little bit about everything.

  Including magical nursery rhymes?

  Putting away the detector, she took out her phone to take some photos of the site that she could share with the others. She stepped backward to get a better shot.

  Something crunched beneath her feet.

  “Crap,” she muttered. Visions of broken glass and rusty metal hinges flashed through her brain. Stooping to investigate, she warily groped through the weeds to see what she had stepped on. Bits of shiny black plastic and metallic silver glinted in the weak sunlight. It took her a moment to identify the object. A gasp escaped her lips. Blue eyes widened in surprise.

  It was another handheld magic detector, similar to the one she had just employed.

  “What the heck?”

  Her first thought was that maybe this was evidence of some weird time-travel shenanigans, and that she was actually retracing the path of her future self who had visited the park sometime in the recent past. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time she had stumbled onto a paradox along those lines. But then a simpler explanation presented itself: another Librarian had already checked out this
site and left their scanner behind.

  Flynn?

  Worry creased her brow. Why would Flynn have come here on his own, and, even more distressing to consider, why had he left his scanner behind? That was top-secret Library tech that was probably semimagical itself. Flynn could be manic sometimes, his restless mind taking off in all directions, but he wasn’t careless. He wouldn’t have left without the device.

  Unless he was rudely interrupted?

  “Oh, Flynn, what have you gotten into now?”

  Glancing around the site, she saw no obvious signs of a struggle, only Humpty Dumpy lying broken on the ground, but that didn’t mean that Flynn hadn’t run into trouble. Risk came with the job, as recently demonstrated by a certain mythological boar, and the Librarians often found themselves contending with ruthless secret societies, rival treasure seekers, and miscellaneous archenemies, any of which might have carried away Flynn against his will. Concerned for his safety, she reminded herself that Flynn had survived on his own as a Librarian for over a decade, which was longer than any other Librarian on the books. He could take care of himself.

  Which didn’t make her any less anxious about him.

  “Flynn?” she called out, raising her voice. “Flynn? It’s me, Eve. Are you still here?”

  Her voice echoed through the desolate park, but received no answer.

  “Flynn! Can you hear me? Answer me, Flynn!”

  It was no use. There was no immediate way of knowing how long the magic detector had been resting in the weeds, but her gut told her that Flynn was long gone. Frustrated, she tried calling him on her phone, but his voice mail was full, as usual. She cursed under her breath as she put her phone back in her pocket. Flynn’s incommunicado status had gone from annoying to alarming.

  She took a closer look at the discarded detector. An embossed plastic label, of the sort made by an old-fashioned label maker, was stuck to the bottom of the device. It read: