by Greg Cox
“I don’t suppose you have a carving knife handy?” Ezekiel asked.
“Does this look like a butcher shop?” Mary said tartly.
She stared aghast at the Blind Mice, who, thankfully, seemed more interested in trashing the library than chasing after the terrified patrons. They scampered madly about the premises, knocking books off shelves and shredding newspapers and magazines, while squeaking loudly enough to hurt Ezekiel’s ears. He and Mary ducked behind the checkout counter.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What are those awful creatures doing here?”
“Best guess? Somebody really doesn’t want you to help me find those pages.”
Their hurried conversation attracted the Blind Mice, who turned and sniffed in their direction. Ugly pink noses twitched ominously. A low growl emanated from the oversized rodents, one of whom was still missing the tip of its tail. Ezekiel hoped it wasn’t holding a grudge.
“Time to get out of here,” Ezekiel decided. Any good thief knew when to make a run for it and he had already clocked all the available escape routes. “Make for the fire exit.”
Mary hesitated. “But … my library?”
“Suit yourself.” Ezekiel started toward the exit. “I guess I’ll just have to find those hidden pages by myself.”
Mary scoffed at the notion. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
They darted for the exit, even as the mice came scrambling over the counter after them. Ezekiel hurled a bulky hardcover, which looked as though the author had been paid by the word, at the disgusting creatures to slow them down while Mary yanked open the door, setting off the fire alarm. The blaring siren struck Ezekiel as another good reason to vacate the premises; he resented alarms on principle.
He hustled Mary out the door. The mice pounced at them, but he slammed the door shut in their faces, so that their heavy bodies smashed into it with force. He heard them squeaking and scratching angrily on the other side of the door.
Could Blind Mice handle doorknobs? Ezekiel wasn’t about to stick around to find out, especially since he heard police cars and fire trucks heading their way. He liked dealing with law enforcement as much as he liked noisy alarms.
Which was to say, not at all.
“You were saying something about a fair?”
8
Northumberland
“So you’re really Jackson Dennings?”
“Guilty as charged,” Stone said to the woman sitting across from him in a cozy pub in the North Country of England. Exposed oak beams held up the ceiling, while an open fireplace kept the place toasty despite the cool fall weather outside. Rows of bottles lined the shelves of a well-equipped bar, not far from the booth they occupied. Laughter and conversation echoed off the venerable stone walls, but Stone was used to chatting up pretty ladies in bars. “At least when I’m writing academic papers on the intersectionality of culture and infrastructure. But when I’m not hiding behind a fancy byline and degree I’m just plain Jake Stone, Librarian.” He smiled engagingly. “But, please, call me Jake.”
“In that case, you must call me Gillian.” An appealing accent revealed that she was native to the region. She examined Stone by the subdued lamplight of the pub. “I have to say, you’re not exactly as I envisioned you.”
“Likewise,” Stone replied.
Dr. Gillian Fell, professor of anthropology at Bede College in Northumberland, was an attractive woman, roughly the same age as Stone, with wavy brown hair, chestnut eyes, and a stylish pair of designer glasses perched upon her nose. A turtleneck sweater showed off her figure. According to Cassandra, she was also yet another descendant of Elizabeth Goose. That Gillian’s particular field of study just happened to be folklore and oral traditions had not escaped Stone. The feather, in this case, seemed to have fallen not far from the goose.
“Is that so?” She arched a graceful eyebrow while her voice took on a teasing flavor. “And whom exactly were you anticipating?”
“The highly erudite author of Reflections on Mirrors and the Other Self, of course.” Who had turned out to look more like Moneypenny than M. “A fascinating piece, really. Some of your insights into the psychological significance of mirrors and reflecting pools, as opposed to their practical uses, really made me think … and reexamine my own assumptions about form versus function.”
He was utterly sincere in his appreciation of her scholarly accomplishments. Back at the Annex, it hadn’t taken him too long to recall where he knew her name from. He was, in fact, quite familiar with her work, which occasionally overlapped with his own studies of traditional art and architecture. He wasn’t sure that he had ever corresponded with her directly as Jackson Dennings, but they had certainly swum in the same circles.
“High praise,” she said, returning the compliment, “from the mind that first postulated a link between Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and Freemasonry, by way of Pythagorean aesthetics.”
That she was acquainted with his own work—as Jackson Dennings—had proved handy when it came to wangling a meeting with the subject of his clipping. He was not above taking advantage of Dennings’s academic reputation to get his foot in the door as it were, especially when that turned out to involve meeting a good-looking colleague for drinks at her favorite pub.
“Thanks again,” he said, “for squeezing me in to your busy schedule.”
“No worries. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”
“Not at all,” he lied, given the urgency of his quest. In truth, the Library was in a race to beat “Mother Goose” to that hidden spell book, but that was hardly something he could just up and explain to Gillian given that he wasn’t sure how much she knew about the magical secrets in her family tree. “But about your recent close encounter with a giant pumpkin…”
She winced at the memory. “I still don’t entirely understand why you would be interested in that, beyond the sheer bizarreness of the whole episode, that is. Something about the symbolic use of pumpkins in Anglo-American folk art?”
“More or less,” he said vaguely. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’ll spare you the whole song and dance.” He smiled at her. “Indulge me.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the anthropologists.” She let out a sigh of resignation. “All right then. Might as well get it over with, I suppose.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said.
She took a sip of ale to fortify herself. “You have to understand, the whole experience was just so … surreal … that even I have trouble believing that it actually happened, and wasn’t simply some phantasmagorical dream or hallucination. I went to bed one night, after a perfectly ordinary evening grading papers, and the next thing I knew I woke up inside something dark and gooey and claustrophobic. I didn’t realize at the time that I was curled up inside an unusually capacious pumpkin of all things, only that I was trapped inside an enclosed space with no idea how I’d gotten there.” She shuddered in recollection. “I swear to God, I hadn’t taken any drugs the night before or drank anything stronger than tea.”
“I believe you,” he said. “Besides, even if you had been under the influence, that wouldn’t explain how you got inside the pumpkin. But I’m still a little fuzzy on one point: were you in any danger of suffocation?”
She shook her head. “No, not right away at least. The pumpkin was hollowed out on the inside, in a way that nobody has quite been able to explain just yet. From what people tell me, the pumpkin—which was on display at the local farmers’ market—appeared entirely untouched from the outside.” She threw up her hands. “Tell me, how is that even possible?”
Magic, Stone thought, wishing there was some way to explain that to Gillian without sounding like a lunatic. “So what happened next?”
“What do you think? I bloody well panicked, kicking and punching hard enough to crack the shell … and raising enough of a ruckus that several Good Samaritans joined in to help liberate me from the pumpkin, much to the dismay and confusion of the fell
ow whose vegetable stand it was.” A wry chuckle escaped her lips. “You should have seen his face. I swear, the poor old gent was almost as gob-smacked as I was.”
“I can imagine,” Stone said. “That must have been a very disorienting experience.”
“That’s putting it mildly.” She stared into her drink as she seemed to open up a bit more, her voice taking on a more troubled, vulnerable tone. “To be frank, I still experience a certain trepidation every night before I go to bed, wondering if something similar—or worse—is going to happen again. I mean, how do I know that I’m not going to wake up at the bottom of a well some morning?”
Stone was tempted to let her in on the recent outbreak of nursery-rhyme-related magic, but he was afraid to scare her off at this juncture. Maybe later, he thought, after we’ve got a better handle on the situation.
“I wish I had some answers for you,” he said lamely.
“No reason why you should.” She adopted a lighter tone to offset the lingering anxieties she had just confessed to. “So, was my twisted Cinderella moment of any use to you, Mr. Stone?”
“Jake,” he insisted again. “And not Cinderella … Mother Goose.”
Her brown eyes widened. “What did you just say?”
Now it was his turn to gulp down some ale before speaking. “Like I said before, it’s complicated.…”
He gave her a carefully edited version of the truth, leaving out the full nature of the Library, the whole Humpty Dumpty business, Mother Goose and her gander, and all the freakier stuff, stressing instead the saga of Elizabeth Goose, her trisected legacy, and the elusive first printing of Mother Goose’s Melodies.
“My associates and I are trying to track down all three pieces of that so-called ghost volume,” he explained, “and some timely genealogical research led us to you.”
Confusion was written on her face. “But what does that have to do with me waking up inside a pumpkin?”
“Good question,” he said, ducking that conversation for now. “But you are descended from Elizabeth Goose of Boston?”
“So the story goes,” she conceded. “As I understand it, my great-great-grandmother served as an army nurse during the First World War, during which duty she met and married a young British soldier and ended up settling down in these parts after the war.”
Which was around the time of the Mother Goose Treaty, Stone noted. “I don’t suppose your great-great-grandma passed down one third of the missing book to you?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said. “Although I suspect I owe a good part of my abiding interest in folklore and such to the stories I heard growing up about our family connection to the ‘real’ Mother Goose.”
“Or maybe it’s just in your blood,” he speculated.
“A fanciful notion, but no more so, I suppose, than finding oneself inexplicably encased in a pumpkin shell.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Speaking of which, why do I get the distinct impression that you’re not telling me everything?”
Because you’re clearly nobody’s fool, he thought, even as his phone chimed for his attention, using Baird’s ringtone.
“Sorry,” he said, saved by the bell. “If you’ll excuse me for a minute…”
“Go ahead,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Was that a promise or a threat? Stone pondered that mystery as he exited the booth and stepped outside the pub to take the call. It was early evening, Greenwich Mean Time, and the sun was already going down, taking the warmth of the day of with it. The sky was clear, though, making for a pleasant autumn night that was eight hours ahead of the Annex—or wherever Baird was calling from.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Plenty,” Baird said. “I just got an update from Jones. Listen up.”
She filled him in on what Ezekiel had learned in Ohio so far, including the bit about a nursery rhyme sampler passed down from generation to generation as a family heirloom. The idea of a secret message embroidered into a piece of folk art intrigued him.
“Interesting,” he said. “Let me try following up on that lead on my end.”
“Just keep us posted on your progress,” Baird said.
“Will do.”
Stone ended the call and stepped back inside the pub. As promised, Gillian was waiting for him in their booth. He took a moment to admire the way the firelight flattered her hair and complexion before he slid back into his seat across from her. Keep your mind on the job, he told himself, despite the fact that he felt some definite chemistry cooking between himself and Gillian. He wondered how many of her students were nursing secret crushes on their highly distracting professor. More than a few, I’m guessing.
“Anything important?” she asked him.
“Possibly.” He explained about how Ezekiel had found a lead to one-third of the lost book hidden in a sampler bearing a nursery rhyme. “Is it too much to hope that you inherited something similar?”
“Not one bit,” she said with obvious excitement. “As it happens, I do have such a sampler proudly displayed on the wall of my flat, not too far from here. But instead of ‘Simple Simon,’ mine has the first few verses of ‘Jack and Jill’ embroidered on it.”
Stone leaned forward eagerly. “As in ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’?”
“The very same!” She pounced on the topic like any true scholar hot on the trail of a new breakthrough or discovery. “As I recall, there are various competing theories as to the meaning of the rhyme, some more plausible than others. One of the prevailing theories is that the rhyme derives from the Norse myth of Hjuki and Bil, which concerns two children, a brother and sister, who were fetching water from a well, using a pail no less, when they were snatched up by the Man in the Moon.”
Taking out her own phone, she went online and called up an old woodcut illustration of two children carrying a long pole between them, upon which was suspended a wooden pail. A leering moon gazed down on them.
“From the Prose Edda?” Stone guessed. “The myth I mean, not the illustration.”
“Precisely.” She put away her phone. “Circa the thirteenth century. That’s centuries before the first known references to the Mother Goose rhymes, so there’s no way to prove a connection, but, as theories go, it’s probably the most convincing.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t get me started on the popular notion that the rhyme actually refers to the beheading of King Louis the Sixteenth and Marie Antoinette, which is utter balderdash and chronologically impossible to boot.”
Stone took her word for it, as his mind struggled to connect an obscure Norse myth to his quest for the missing volume. According to Jenkins, many of the Mother Goose rhymes had roots deep in antiquity, but the segments of the spell book were not hidden away until 1918 or so, which implied … what? That any clues would date back to the twentieth century, not medieval Scandinavia?
“I confess that was always my favorite Mother Goose rhyme growing up,” Gillian said. “To be honest, I used to think that the ‘Jill’ in the sampler was named after me … when I was very young, naturally.”
“Yeah, about that,” Stone said. “Jill … Gillian. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Stone wondered if the hidden clue was sitting right across from him.
“Not as much as you might think,” she said, dismissing the notion. “Jill—or sometimes Gill—was pretty much a generic term for a young girl or sweetheart in days of yore, dating back to Shakespeare at least. ‘Jack shall have Jill; naught shall go ill,’ etcetera.”
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Stone said, recognizing the quote. “Act three, scene two, if I remember right.”
“Very good.” She nodded in approval. “I’m impressed.”
He was pleased to hear it, more so perhaps than was strictly necessary. Eyes on the prize, he reminded himself again. “Getting back to Jack and Jill, what else is there in the rhyme? A hill, a well, a pail…”
Gillian brainstormed along with him. “Well, wells and hills are recurring th
emes in folklore in general and Mother Goose in particular. ‘Pussy’s in the well,’ ‘the old woman who lived under a hill,’ and so forth.”
“But a well on top of a hill?” Stone said, thinking aloud. “That doesn’t really make any sense. Who puts a well on top of a hill you have to climb every day? Unless maybe you’re talking about some kind of fortified hilltop stronghold that required a secure source of water.” Inspiration struck and he smacked his forehead for not seeing it earlier. “Of course! Look where we are right now.”
“In a pub?” she asked.
“In Northumberland,” he clarified. “Because of its proximity to the Scottish border, and the battles waged back and forth across that border, Northumbria has the highest concentration of old castles and forts of any county in Britain. And those hillside fortresses would have had wells or cisterns.”
“Where my great-great-grandmother might have hidden her third of the book?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Stone said. “Are there any ancient structures on top of hills around here?”
She nodded. “There are the remains of an old Roman fort atop a hill just outside town, although there’s not much left of it and what’s there isn’t very impressive, not like the bigger, more impressive Roman ruins at Vindolanda or Housesteads. You know, the ones that draw all the tourists.”
“All the better to hide something in.” Stone thought these hilltop ruins were sounding more promising by the minute. “And that bygone fort would have definitely needed a source of water for drinking and bathing. Hell, the Roman legions didn’t set up shop anywhere without building a bathhouse or two. There’s bound to be a well of some sort buried amidst those ruins.”
“And where there’s a well, there’s a way?” she quipped.
“You’re reading my mind.” He glanced at his watch. The night was not getting any younger. “Is there any place in this town where I can pick up some hiking and caving gear in a hurry?”
