Enchanted Ivy

by Sarah Beth Durst

  "So is the Key in there, or just a clue to the next clue?" Lily asked Tye.

  "They really have you looking for the Key?" he asked.

  She bristled. "You don't think I can find it?"

  "It's not that," he said quickly. "It's ... you're a surprise, you know. Going to be fun to figure you out."

  For about the five millionth time since she'd met Tye, she felt herself blush. "Not much to figure out," she said. "There's nothing mysterious about me." Mom was the one who was full of riddles. Lily was as ordinary as peanut butter and jelly. Possibly peanut butter and bananas.

  "Yeah, right." He cupped his hand around her cheek, and she felt her skin tingle again with that fuzzy electricity. She

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  froze, scarcely breathing. She'd never had a boy cradle her face in his palm, even if he was regarding her more like an interesting scientific specimen than an object of adoration. He released her. "I'll be back before you've found your next clue."

  "You aren't coming with me?" she asked. Inwardly, she winced. She shouldn't beg him to stay with her. Just because he was the cutest guy who had ever talked to her ... On the other hand, shouldn't he come with her? He had said he was her guard. "Don't you need to protect me from extra-fussy librarians or dangerously dust-ridden books?"

  He flashed his lopsided smile. "Just watch out for rogue book carts."

  She opened the library door. When she glanced back over her shoulder, he'd already walked away and was looking up at a gargoyle of a cloaked man with a flute. She had only a second to wonder what he was doing before a family of four approached. Rather than continue to block the door, she scooted inside.

  The library foyer was a warm honey-colored wood, the same color as Tye's eyes. Quit thinking about him, she told herself. If she passed the test, she'd have plenty of time to moon about college boys with nice eyes. Right now she had a book to find.

  Lily marched across the lobby only to stop at a set of turnstiles. Security guards were checking student ID cards. She considered her options: One, she could claim she was a

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  student and try to bluff her way through (not a good idea--she was a lousy actress); or ... She couldn't tell the truth. The Legacy Test was supposed to be a secret.

  As she tried to think of a plan, she half listened to the family of four touring the library lobby. The woman was reminiscing about hours spent here on her senior thesis. The father bounced a toddler in a tiger-cub outfit on his hip while the girl gazed up at her mom with wide brown eyes. They looked like a poster for the Perfect Family. Lily knew a few families like that at home. The mothers always chatted politely with Lily's mom, but they'd look at Lily with pity when they thought she wouldn't notice.

  The looks had only gotten worse in recent years, as Mom forgot more and more. Lily watched the alum gesturing as she described the carrel where she'd written her thesis. Lily bet that no one had ever looked at that woman with pity. She wondered if Tye would look at her with pity once he knew about her mom.

  Focus, Lily, she told herself.

  She spotted a sign that said VISITORS. One short conversation later (including liberal use of the words "prospective student"), and she was in possession of a temporary visitor's pass. She sailed by the guards, bypassed the reference room with its vaulted ceiling and Gothic windows, and headed to the elevators that bore the label, STACKS. There was a handy-dandy guide beside the elevator door identifying which floor had which set of books. The

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  900s were on C-level, it said, three floors below ground level. Piece of cake, she thought.

  As she rode the elevator down, she wondered how large this library was to have three levels under ground. She pictured secret catacombs deep below the earth.

  The doors slid open on C-level, and she saw her imagination wasn't far off. She stepped off the elevator to face darkened rows of bookshelves. Catacombs indeed.

  Behind her, the elevator whirred as it rose, and then there was silence. No voices. No footsteps. No scratch of pencils, no click of laptop keys, no rustle of pages. Kind of creepy, she thought. She walked forward, and her shoes slapped loudly on the floor. It was so phenomenally quiet that she felt as if she should tiptoe. She wished Tye had come with her. She didn't like the feeling that she was the only person on the entire floor.

  Only the center aisle was lit. Each aisle had its own light switch (either to conserve energy or to increase creepiness). Shadows shrouded the books. Lily hurried down the center aisle, reading the call numbers on the labels: 870s, 880s, 890s, 900s, 910s, 930s. She halted and backtracked. The labels jumped from 919.98 Zoo to 930.0 Abr. Worse, the 915 shelf and the 930 shelf were flush against each other so that you couldn't walk down the aisle to check for the 920s. How did anyone ... She spotted a crank on the endcap of the row.

  Oh. Right.

  Stepping back, she noticed that every other bookshelf was

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  flush against its neighbor and each had a crank to separate the shelves. It doubled the number of bookshelves that could fit on the floor. "Clever, Lily," she muttered to herself. "Way to impress the Old Boys." At least Tye wasn't here to see her flummoxed by sliding shelves.

  As she turned the crank, the shelves groaned and lurched sideways. She imagined a horror movie where the villain squeezed his victims between movable bookshelves. Attack of the Killer Librarian. Definitely a low-budget movie.

  The bookshelves creaked and then settled in their final positions. Silence wrapped around her again. Lily shivered. She never thought she'd be freaked out by a library. On the other hand, she'd never been in a dimly lit, preternaturally silent library buried three floors below sunlight and fresh air. Walking quickly down the row, she scanned the shelves for the call numbers. Like the label had said, the books jumped from 919 to 930. "Where--?" she began to ask out loud.

  Screech! The bookshelf shifted toward her.

  "Hello? I'm in here!" she called. "Please stop turning the crank!" The shelf rattled closer. She darted down the row and burst into the center aisle. "Hey, I said--"

  No one was there.

  The crank continued to turn unaided until the bookshelves slammed together. She leaned forward to examine the crank. She didn't see a motor. So how--

  Clang, screech!

  Across the aisle, a second bookshelf shuddered, then

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  shifted. Lily backed away as the crank whirred faster. Jolting sideways, the bookshelf slammed against the next shelf. Books rocked, and then the library fell silent again.

  Okay, she thought, this is seriously creepy. Maybe she should return to the nice, sunny lobby and ask the librarians at the information desk where to find the 920s. She liked that idea. Lily headed for the elevator.

  Metal shrieked, and a bookshelf shot across the center aisle to block her path. Several books tumbled off the shelf and landed at her feet. Her heart hammered in her rib cage. "This isn't funny," she called. "You can stop now!"

  She didn't hear anyone. Maybe it was a malfunction. Or it could be part of some automatic air-out-the-books maintenance routine, the library's version of an automatic sprinkler system. Not that she'd ever heard of such a thing, but there had to be a nice, logical explanation for why the shelves were suddenly acting possessed.

  Lily speed-walked down a row. As she reached the end, the bookshelf sprang back and slammed against the brick wall. She ran back to the center aisle. All around her, dozens of bookshelves lurched forward and sideways. Metal crashed and shrieked. Books tumbled to the floor. She screamed as a set of shelves crashed together in front of her.

  "Help!" she yelled. "Someone, anyone, help!"

  She zigzagged through a moving maze. As shelves slid, she plunged through gaps. Aisles and rows slammed shut behind her.

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  Up ahead, Lily saw an old card-catalog cabinet. Hip height, it was an island in a storm. Lily raced toward it, ducking her head as books sailed off the flying shelves. The bookshelves zoomed around her faster and faster. Reac
hing the cabinet, she scrambled on top. A shelf smashed into the brick wall on one side of her, and then a second shelf crashed into the wall on the opposite side. A third shelf sailed directly toward her. Lily screamed and threw her hands in front of her face--

  The shelf halted inches from her fingertips.

  Everything fell silent again. All the bookshelves were still. Crouched on top of the cabinet, Lily listened, but all she heard was her own breathing, fast and loud.

  She had to get out of here. Now. Before it started again.

  Sliding off her perch into the narrow space between the cabinet and a bookshelf, Lily yanked books off the lowest shelf. She could clear a shelf, crawl through, and then run for the elevators. She'd emptied half the bottom shelf before she noticed the call numbers on the spines of the books: 921.

  "Bastards," she said out loud.

  Lily clapped her lips shut before she said anything worse. The Old Boys could be listening. She bet they were watching her right now through video cameras, chortling to one another as they sipped port in their leather chairs. They'd succeeded in scaring their newest candidate with mere bookshelves.

  What sort of college admissions test involved terrifying

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  the applicant half to death? Lily took a deep breath and told herself to focus. She could tell them what she thought of their practical joke after she had her automatic-acceptance guarantee. For now, she had to find that book.

  Lily ran her fingers over the book spines. 921.45 Bre, 921.45 Div, 921.45 Lin, 921.45 Zar ... She didn't see a 921.45 Wil. She stood up and checked the other shelves.

  A few book titles caught her eye: Rituals and Music of the Northern Ogre Clan, On the Behavior of Brownies, Goblin Genealogy. She plucked a book at random off the shelf and flipped through it. Mermaids, a Life Cycle of. It mimicked a research book, complete with charts and graphs and footnotes. It even had drawings of mermaid skeletons and diagrams of mermaid respiratory systems. Someone had put a lot of work into this parody. Replacing it, she selected another book. This one, Chimeras of Today, was the same: hundreds of pages of detailed "research." She returned it to the shelf and noticed that none of the books in this section had a publisher's logo on the spine. Maybe this was some sort of odd, self-published fan fiction stash? Or, ooh, maybe these were instruction manuals for some kind of elaborate homegrown Dungeons & Dragons game. Or fake dissertations. She bet the authors were the Old Boys themselves. If her grandfather (who read only literary fiction by either semidepressed writers or authors who eschewed all adverbs) had written one of these, she was going to tease him mercilessly.

  Lily scanned the section. Cane ... Card ... Carr ... aha!

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  She pulled a book off the shelf and read the title: Dryads, a History by William Carter.

  She felt as if the world froze as she stared at the author's name. Grandpa's name was Richard. This book was written by a William Carter.

  It was written by her father.

  For an instant, she thought she must be hallucinating. But that was impossible. She'd taken the medicine. It was only that the book had surprised her, that was all. She hadn't expected to encounter anything that her father had done or touched. Her fingers traced lightly over his name, embossed in gold print on the soft black leather. Her hands trembled.

  She shouldn't be so surprised. She knew that her father had been a student here. That was one of the few facts she did know about him. She didn't know what he'd looked like. (Mom had destroyed the photos years ago, though she had no memory of doing it or why.) Lily didn't even know his real name. (He'd changed his last name to Mom's when they married. Grandpa said her father had had "issues" with his own family.) He'd died in a car accident a few months after Lily was born.

  Hands still shaking, Lily opened the book. She flipped through sketches of trees--everything from bonsai to evergreens, each with a figure beside it. The figures were clearly fantastical. Some had leaves for hair. Others had twigs for arms. She skimmed a chapter entitled "Powers of a Tree

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  Spirit, Mastery of Plants" and decided her father had been a creative man. Also, kind of a dork.

  She didn't see what any of this had to do with a key. Setting her father's book down on the card catalog, she pulled out the W drawer. She rifled through the cards, looking for an author whose last name began with "Wil" and call numbers that matched the ones on the Unseeing Reader's clue. One minute later, she had it:

  Author: Wilson, Woodrow.

  Title: The Gargoyles of Princeton: Lessons from the Literate Ape.

  "You guys think you're hilarious, don't you?" she muttered. There was no way that Woodrow Wilson, former president of the United States, had written an entire dissertation-length book on gargoyles ... unless he'd been a member of Vineyard Club? Could these books be part of a hundred-plus-year-old in-joke?

  She studied the subtitle: Lessons from the Literate Ape. She chewed on her lower lip, thinking. She'd heard that name before. Hadn't the tour guide mentioned a gargoyle called the Literate Ape?

  This had to be her next clue.

  She couldn't wait to tell Tye.

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  CHAPTER Three

  Lily fled Firestone Library into bright, beautiful, and not-at-all-creepy sunlight. As she emerged, she heard ringing in her ears again--she hadn't realized that it had stopped inside the library. She shook her head as if she could shake out the sound and scanned the plaza for Tye.

  She scolded herself for being so eager to find him. He'd joked about rogue book carts, but he hadn't warned her about the bookshelves. She had to remember that, as cute as he might be, he wasn't necessarily on her side.

  She spotted him across the plaza. One foot on the chapel steps, he was looking up, talking to someone she couldn't see. He was probably talking about the pathetic high school girl who'd had to be practically hit over the head with the Orange Key Tour clue and who'd nearly had heart failure over a few remote-controlled bookshelves.

  Approaching him, she caught a few words: "... old worm ...

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  I don't know why I even try ... certainly not to you ... even they aren't that stupid ..." Oddly, he didn't seem to be talking to anyone. He was focused on the gargoyles above the arch, a ribbon of stone leaves and grapes interspersed with foxes and birds and lizards. She didn't see what was so fascinating about them. The only gargoyle that caught her eye was an S-shaped dragon, curled between the grape leaves and vines. Its curved neck was caught in a stone chain, and it looked out over the plaza with sad puppy-dog eyes.

  Coming up behind Tye, she asked, "What's up with the obsession with the gargoyles here? The tour guide, the Old Boys, you ..."

  He spun around so fast that it was nearly a leap. "Hey! You're back. Great!" He flashed his patented lopsided grin and then quickly guided her by the elbow away from the chapel, as if he were steering her away from a patch of poison ivy. She felt a tingle on her elbow like static electricity.

  "Any luck in the library?" Tye asked.

  Lily nodded. "I'm supposed to go to the Literate Ape."

  "Huh," he said.

  She was surprised that the Old Boys hadn't briefed him already. "That was the clue from the special catalog that the possessed bookshelves guided me to."

  His eyebrows shot up.

  "It was very Scooby-Doo."

  He looked blank.

  "You know, Scooby, Shaggy, Mystery Machine. 'If it

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  weren't for you meddling kids ...'" She trailed off. Okay, she'd made herself look like enough of a tool. "Never mind. I, um, have to go find a rock now."

  "He's on Dillon Gym," Tye said. "You don't know about the Princeton gargoyles?"

  "The true professors of Princeton?" Lily mocked the tour guide. She shook her head. "What do they have to do with the Key and the Legacy Test?" Come on, she thought, give me a hint! The Old Boys seemed to have a theme here with all the gargoyles, but she didn't see the connection to a key.

  "You really don't kno
w," he said, more to himself than to her. He grinned at her as if she'd done something marvelous. "And here I thought today was going to be boring." He clapped a hand on her shoulder, sending tiny tingles down her arm. "Let's go find some answers."

  He headed for the East Pyne arch and waved again at the Unseeing Reader. Lily glanced up at the gargoyle and wondered if the Old Boys who'd supplied the clue knew about her father's book. She wondered if Tye knew about it. Gathering up her nerve to ask, she followed him through the archway into the ivy-choked courtyard. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Yes, this is my natural hair color."

  She grinned. "I'm serious."

  "Okay, shoot," he said, stopping.

  Shadowed and cool, the courtyard felt like a secret alcove. She was hyperaware that she was alone with this intense, cool,

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  and intriguing boy and that she had his full attention. The humming-ringing-singing in her ears sounded extra loud. "Um ...," she said. "There were these books in the library...."

  "I'm told libraries have such things," he said solemnly.

  She ignored that. "Different books. Strange books. One of them was by--"

  A weight smashed hard into the center of her back. Lily lurched forward and slammed down knees first on the slate flagstones. Pain shot through her knees and up her thighs. All the air whooshed out of her lungs.

  "Lily!" Tye yelled as he dove toward her.

  She screamed as tiny pricks stabbed into her shoulder. "Ow, ow, ow--get it off!" Lily swatted at her back, and her hand smacked into leathery skin.

  Tye yanked the animal off her back and flung it across the courtyard into the ivy. She heard a smack as it crashed to the ground several yards away. Tye knelt beside her and started swearing. "Look at me, Lily. Can you focus? It bit you. Oh, shit." He pressed his fingers to her neck, feeling for her pulse.