The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase

by Greg Cox

It still felt wrong to pull a gun on Mother Goose, even knowing what Baird knew, but the sun was rising and they were running out of time. With any luck, the mere sight of the firearm would be enough to distract Mother Goose long enough for the lurking Librarians to make their move.

  “A gun, truly?” Mother Goose shook her head sadly. “I’m disappointed in you, Eve. You’re far too clever a girl to resort to such pedestrian means.”

  “Sorry to let you down,” Baird said, “but that doesn’t change anything. Surrender the book or—”

  A loud honk came from above, startling her. Glancing up, she saw the giant gander swooping down at her while squawking up a storm. She started to adjust her aim and swing her sidearm toward the diving bird, but the gander was too fast. Its beak bit down on her wrist, causing her to cry out. She lost her grip on the gun, which went flying into the bushes. A flapping wing buffeted her, knocking her to the ground. She punched, trying to get it to release her wrist, but she couldn’t get a good blow in. Feathers smacked her in the face.

  Damn, Baird thought. Where’s a squirt-gun full of magic rejuvenating water when you need one?

  “That’s enough, my pet!” the crone called out. “No need to damage the poor dear. She’s having a bad enough morning as it is!”

  Heeding its mistress’s command, the gander let go of Baird’s wrist and flapped back up into the trees overlooking the scene. The disheveled Guardian scrambled to her feet and glanced around fruitlessly for her weapons, both of which were lost somewhere in the thick weeds and underbrush. Spitting a small white feather from her mouth, she mentally kicked herself for forgetting about the gander—and for getting disarmed by a bird!

  “You know,” Baird said, glaring at Mother Goose, “ordinarily I wouldn’t want to get rough with a woman of your advanced years, but you’re not getting the senior citizen treatment anymore.” She clenched her fists, while keeping one eye on the sky in case the gander took another run at her. “Get ready to cash in on your Medicare benefits.”

  “Stay back, Eve!” the crone said menacingly. “And that goes for the rest of you, too.” She swept her gaze over the surrounding shrubbery. “You might as well come out of hiding. This is my Garden and my eyes are everywhere. I have nothing to fear from anyone, least of all an impudent pack of apprentice Librarians!”

  “Apprentice?” Ezekiel popped out from behind a nearby tree. “Who are you calling an apprentice?”

  “Says the thief who doesn’t even know how to use a card catalog,” Mother Goose mocked him. She spun around atop the wall, pointing here and there. “And the roughneck, and the waif…”

  “Waif?” Cassandra emerged from hiding, her cover obviously blown. “I haven’t been a waif in years.…”

  “You tell her, Cassie.” Stone rose up from behind a bush across from her. He cracked his knuckles in anticipation of a brawl. “We’ve taken on tougher customers than her. Let’s cook this Goose.”

  They converged on her warily, but Mother Goose was quick on the rhyme:

  Ring a ring of roses,

  A pocket full of posies,

  Ashes, ashes,

  You all fall down!

  Baird’s legs turned to rubber and she collapsed onto the ground, landing facedown a few yards away from Humpty Dumpty’s shattered remains. Fallen leaves cushioned her landing, but the impact still knocked the wind out of her. Loud crashes, shouts, and curses signaled that her Librarians had hit the ground as well. She tried to spring back up to her feet, but her limbs failed to respond. It was all she could do to lift her head high enough to see what was happening. Ashes fell from the sky like snowflakes, weighing her down and tickling her nose.

  “Stone?” she called out. “Cassandra? Ezekiel?”

  “I’m down!” Stone shouted back. “Trying to get back up again, but I haven’t got the strength. Feels like that heavy-gravity trap back in that secret lab outside Peking.…”

  “That was an artificial dark-matter event horizon,” Cassandra corrected him from a few yards away. “This feels more like the world’s worst case of the flu. I feel too weak and heavy to move.”

  “Whatever,” Ezekiel said impatiently, “we’ve all face-planted … and we can’t get up!”

  Baird remembered hearing somewhere that the “ring around the rosie” rhyme actually had to do with the Black Death back in the Dark Ages. A chill ran down her spine.

  “Crap!” she blurted. “She gave us the Plague!”

  “Nonsense!” Mother Goose said. “My rhyme has nothing to do with the Plague; that’s a spurious bit of poppycock no serious scholar believes.” She turned back to the levitating spell book. “Now then, if you don’t mind, where was I?” She peered over the top of her spectacles at the page before picking up the rhyme where she left off:

  All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,

  Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

  That should have been the end of the rhyme, but Mother Goose kept going, reciting secret verses Baird had never heard before:

  Humpty Dumpty, together once more,

  Humpty Dumpty, open the door,

  A new day is dawning, happy birthday to you,

  Out with the old world, in with the new!

  The spell kicked in at once. Suddenly, there was something electric in the air, like before an approaching storm. A rosy glow enveloped the two halves of Humpty’s head as they began to stir of their own accord, drawn toward each other as though by some magnetic force, while the headless figure on the wall came to life as well, reaching out expectantly for his missing head. Rocking upright, the right and left halves were reunited at last, colliding together to form a large ovoid head with the wide end on the bottom. The egg’s painted features awoke. Humpty’s wide grin broadened in a way that made Baird’s skin crawl. A dish-sized eye winked at her as she looked on helplessly, pinned to the ground by a children’s nursery rhyme of all things.

  “Stop this!” Baird shouted at Mother Goose. “We know what you’re planning and—”

  “Plan?” Mother Goose sounded offended. “I don’t plan, I act. I go by rhyme, not reason. I do as the spirit moves me. I am my own muse, the one true Mother Goose. No plans for me, only inspired flights of fancy!”

  Sounds like something Flynn would say, Baird thought, then froze upon the ground as the stray observation echoed in her head.

  Like something Flynn would say …

  Her heart skipped a beat. A wild, utterly crazy idea stampeded across her brain, knocking over all the furniture as it abruptly burst out into the open from wherever it might have been hiding in the back of her mind. She remembered the old vacation photo Jenkins had found in the Mother Goose folder back at the Library, and she suddenly knew in her heart who the little boy in the photo was and why he had looked oddly familiar. She gazed in shock at Mother Goose.

  “Flynn?”

  23

  A few days ago

  Oregon

  Flynn Carsen ran into the Annex as though the Curse of the Seven Hells was chasing him, which, in fact, it was. A jade dagger whizzed past his head, following him through the Magic Door as he dashed from the Even More Forbidden City, deep in the Jiangsu Province of mainland China, into a cluttered office on the opposite side of the globe. Mystic lightning crackled in the doorway as he left his pursuers and the Far East behind. The flying dagger thwacked into a polished wooden railing across from the entrance, lodging deeply in the wood. Flynn wondered if the esoteric weapon had any historic value in its own right or was just for killing intrepid Librarians venturing into forbidden tombs in search of hazardous magic.

  I’ll have to consult Dragomiloff’s Guide to Lethal Implements with regard to that dagger, he thought, when I have a free moment.

  Skidding to a halt, Flynn paused to catch his breath. A lean, slightly gawky fellow whose boyish visage and manner belied his forty-some years, he was dressed for desert grave-robbing in a pith helmet, jodhpurs, knee-high hiking boots, and a rumpled safari jacket that had seen plenty of action o
ver the years. Said jacket was also slightly shredded at the moment, due to the vicious claws of the angry terra-cotta cat currently trapped in the plastic pet carrier Flynn was holding on to with one hand. Furious at its confinement, the ceramic feline hissed and snarled and scratched at the interior of the carrier, despite having been made of fired clay more than two thousand years ago. Its violent tantrum rocked the carrier, making it harder to hold on to.

  Good thing terra-cotta cats didn’t weigh that much.

  “Bad kitty!” Flynn scolded. “Just a few more minutes and you can take a nice long catnap again.”

  He placed the carrier down on the nearest available surface, which just happened to be the conference table. In his other hand, he clutched an ancient bamboo scroll, which he unrolled with a flick of his wrist. His late Han Dynasty Mandarin was a little rusty, but he could decipher the characters on the ancient scroll without too much difficulty. Clearing his throat, which was as dry as the forgotten tomb he had just escaped from, he recited an arcane incantation that had not been spoken aloud since the Great Wall was just a fence:

  [REDACTED PER LIBRARY PROTOCOL]

  A flash of azure light lit up the pet carrier from inside. The terra-cotta cat let out one last plaintive meow before going stiff and toppling over onto one side, no longer animated by primordial magic. The unmistakable odor of oolong tea lingered in the air.

  “Whoa.” Flynn wrested the knife from the door and gave it a quick flip. “That was trickier than I expected. Who knew ceramic cats wouldn’t come when called?”

  He brushed the dust of ages off his shoulders and hat before stowing the cat and carrier in a supply closet until he had the time and energy to schlep it all the way over to the Artificial Pets and Wildlife collection elsewhere in the Library. He tossed the displaced dagger into the closet as well. He tried not to think about just how closely the knife had whizzed by his head.

  Occupational hazard, he thought.

  In retrospect, though, he probably should’ve recruited some backup for this mission. He was trying to be a better team player these days, out of respect for Eve and the new crop of Librarians, but sometimes he still liked to fly solo on a case just for old time’s sake. And a routine, seemingly by-the-numbers tomb excursion had hardly seemed like a job for the whole team.

  Speaking of whom …

  “Hello?” he called out. “Anybody home?”

  He soon discovered that nobody was present to greet him, let alone congratulate him on yet another death-defying job well done, but then he realized that China was fifteen hours ahead of Portland, which meant it was—he did the calculations in his head rather than cheating by looking at a clock—roughly 3:45 in the morning, Pacific time.

  No wonder the place is so deserted.

  He glanced around at the empty office, which was literally quieter than the tomb he had just vacated. Given the lateness of the hour, it was no surprise that nobody else was on hand. Neither the Librarians nor their glamorous Guardian actually lived at the Annex, even though it often felt that way. Flynn assumed that even Jenkins had retired for the night, assuming the ageless caretaker actually required slumber the way mere mortals did.

  Does Jenkins ever sleep? Flynn wondered. Never occurred to me to ask.

  For himself, he was far too wired to turn in, not to mention fifteen hours out of sync with the local clocks, so he figured he might as well take advantage of the peace and quiet to get in a little “me time” while he had the Annex to himself. The more he thought about it, in fact, the more this seemed like an ideal opportunity to kick back, chill out, and maybe catch up with the news.

  Yep, he thought, that’s just the ticket.

  He hung his (slightly battered) helmet on a hat rack, next to an industrial hard hat, a deerstalker cap, a red velvet fez, a Native American headdress, a scuba mask, a samurai helmet, a Venetian plague-doctor mask, a bishop’s miter, a pair of night-vision goggles, and a stylish black silk top hat, suitable for formal occasions, that had also been known to generate a rabbit or two under certain extraordinary circumstances, before trading his shredded outerwear for a comfortable burgundy smoking jacket.

  That’s better, he thought. Less like a doomed archaeologist and more like a scholarly gentleman of leisure, settling in for a relaxing evening.

  Slightly ruining the effect was the portable magic detector still clipped to his belt. Flynn didn’t like to rely on the gadget too often for fear of losing his edge, but it had come in handy when tracking the ceramic feline through the labyrinthine tunnels and secret passages of that particular cursed tomb. He unhooked the device and laid it down on the table where the cat carrier had briefly rested.

  “And now,” he loudly informed the Library, “I am officially off duty.”

  He peeked apprehensively at the Clippings Book, just in case it had other plans, but apparently it was on the same page, as it were. Reasonably confident that he would not be disturbed, he wandered over to the Annex’s well-stocked news stacks, where he picked up the evening edition of The New York Courier. The Library subscribed to pretty much every newspaper and periodical on the planet, including those serving the dragon, leprechaun, and cryptid communities, but Flynn was still a New Yorker at heart and had been reading The Courier since before most kids his age even knew how to read. It was still his hometown paper, even if he was based out of Portland these days.

  Could be worse, he reflected. Could have been Antarctica.

  Paper in hand, he strolled back to the desk he shared with Eve and sat down to peruse. Ezekiel often mocked Flynn for still reading “dead tree” newspapers in the digital area, but Flynn didn’t care. He still enjoyed making his way through pages of folded newsprint, just as he still preferred bound paper books to their electronic equivalents. Sometimes it was just more relaxing to read the old-fashioned way.

  You can take the bookworm out of the twentieth century, he thought, but you can’t take the twentieth century out of the bookworm.

  Also relaxing? Catching up on current events that had nothing to do with perilous quests and supernatural menaces. Flynn enjoyed his job and wouldn’t have traded it for all the Jewels of Opar, but it was nice to take a break now and then, if only to remind himself that life still went on as usual for most of the world, even with all the wild magic running loose these days, reactivating dormant ley lines and long quiescent artifacts. With all due respect to the Clippings Book, he was looking forward to unwinding with some totally mundane news items.

  The more ordinary, the better.

  He skimmed past the front-page news and world affairs in search of more low-key stories. Turning to the local news, he stopped and stared as an unexpected headline caught his eye—and brought a pang to his heart.

  “No Happy Endings. ‘Mother Goose’ Theme Park Scheduled for Demolition.”

  “Oh, my,” he murmured, shaking his head sadly. Bittersweet nostalgia drove him to retrieve an old photo album from the bottom drawer of his desk, where he kept various personal mementos, including twenty-two diplomas, a high school yearbook, and a blue ribbon he won in a spelling bee back in fifth grade. Most people would keep such souvenirs at home, he suspected, but, honestly, the Library had been his only real home for more than a decade now, so he kept his most precious possessions there, along with all the other relics.

  He dusted off the album, feeling vaguely guilty that he hadn’t looked at it for so long. Years had elapsed since his mother had passed away, but old memories reminded him how much he still missed her. He flipped through the album until he came to the photo he was looking for: himself as a small boy, grinning in front of a life-sized Humpty Dumpty figure atop a decorative brick wall.

  A wistful smile lifted the corner of Flynn’s lips. He remembered that afternoon. Located just across the river from Queens, where he’d grown up, Mother Goose’s Magic Garden had been a favorite summer excursion back in the day, both before and after his father died. Flynn sighed, recalling how simple life had seemed back then, before he’d grown up
and discovered that myths and magic and fairy tales were real, and that Mother Goose was far more than just a storybook character.

  Mother Goose …

  It occurred to him that the Mother Goose Treaty, which Judson had once told him about, was coming up on its one hundredth anniversary. Flynn had never actually inspected the Treaty, which was the work of a much earlier Librarian, but was it possible that there was an expiration date on the Treaty, or perhaps some special clauses or riders that kicked in after a full century?

  Couldn’t hurt to check it out, he thought. And I do need to file the Bamboo Sutra anyway.…

  Putting away the photo album and newspaper, he exited the Annex and made the long trek across the Library to Subsection IX of the Archives, where were kept rare, often one-of-a-kind documents and records that were unlikely to be consulted on a regular basis, such as the Ultra Charta, The Arcturus Compact, The Transubstantiation Proclamation, the original deed to the Library of Alexandria, and, in theory, the celebrated Mother Goose Treaty of 1918.

  Look at me, he thought proudly, getting out ahead of a potential situation for once. Eve will be impressed.

  Actually locating the Treaty proved harder than expected, however. He knew where it was supposed to be, but recent events had resulted in a certain degree of disarray at the Library. Random hallways and wings had rearranged themselves, doors and carpets had changed color without warning, cross-referenced materials had literally crossed over from one collection to another, certain artifacts had gone missing before being recovered. Flynn liked to think that everything was back where it belonged, kinda sorta, but the Library was a big place and sorting through the older Archives had not been a top priority.

  So would the Treaty be under “Goose, Mother” or “Mother Goose”?

  For the second time today, he found himself playing archaeologist, rooting through dusty old files and folios in search of the elusive Treaty. A lesser Librarian might have given up, but the challenge only invigorated Flynn, increasing his determination to track down the Treaty.