Viviani hid a grin. Technically, she didn’t need to bring Merit and Eva through the reading room to get to the basement from their apartment; in fact, it was quite out of the way—akin to two city blocks. But there was nothing like it to set the mood.
The Main Reading Room was filled with hundreds of tables, chairs, and dimmed brass lamps. On every inch of wall surrounding the huge open space stood shelves of books and books and books, two stories high. The creeping shadows, coupled with the silent, dark stacks of leather-bound spines, looked to Viviani like the ribs of a skeleton beneath a massive sleeping beast.
Plus, well, Viviani knew they couldn’t head to the basement at exactly midnight. Mr. Eames, the night guard, would be there now, keys jangling, lips whistling, bow tie bowing. In another eight minutes, he’d move on.
“Here is where it happened,” Viviani whispered into the massive dark room, and her words were whisked into a space as big as a football field. “Here is where Big Red died. While working on the ceiling.”
The three girls looked up, up, up—five stories high, to the creation suspended above them. “It’s so high I’m dizzy just looking at it,” Eva whispered.
Merit stopped in the middle of the reading room and turned slowly, slowly. “Wow,” she breathed, and the cold, cavernous space made her breath wisp. “Look at all this stuff I don’t know yet.”
Viviani smiled at the yet part. Her father always said bold learners think in terms of yet.
The sixteen two-story windows were the only source of light, and the moonbeams that snuck in were weak. When a cloud passed over the sliver of moon, it caused shadows to crawl over the stacks of books, making the books appear as if they were alive. Waking. Breathing. Squirming.
Viviani knew just how alive those bookcases truly were. At least in her heart they were; the stories they held felt real and teeming with life. “Come on,” she whispered, heading for the wide, smooth stairs. “Big Red lives in the basement.”
When they reached the stairs, Merit didn’t hesitate: she slung one leg over the sleek wooden banister and swooshed down the stairs to the story below, nightgown billowing, camera around her neck swaying. Viviani pinched back another grin and followed suit. The cool banister, the whooshing air around her: Viviani’s goose bumps got goose bumps.
Eva shook her head. “You two are going to break your necks.” She padded down the flight of stairs to catch up.
On the first floor, they heard it: whistling!
Viviani grabbed the hands of her friends and pulled them into a nook just under the grand staircase.
“The ghost?” Eva asked, eyes wide.
Viviani shook her head. “Worse,” she whispered. “Mr. Eames.”
The night guard would not only deduct five points from Viviani’s Master Thief score but also send them straight back to the apartment at this time of night. Everyone at Viviani’s school wanted to see a picture of this ghost now. She couldn’t get turned back at this point by Mr. Eames. Too much was riding on this.
Sure enough, Mr. Eames clattered and jangled up the stairs. He turned the corner and paused, two feet away from the trio of girls lurking in the shadows nearby.
Eva squeezed Viviani’s hand. Merit bit her bottom lip.
Mr. Eames sneezed. It sounded in the dark, cavernous space like a gunshot, and Eva whimpered.
“God bless me,” he said with a chuckle. He straightened his bow tie, and on he went.
Viviani exhaled. Good thing Mr. Eames was as loud as a herd of cattle. The trio crept from their hiding spot.
They wound deeper and deeper into the library, leaving the windows, and most of the light, behind. They finally reached the basement and headed down the corridor to the stacks, past the rooms where Viviani wasn’t allowed. Soon, there was little more than the small, sweeping yellow beam from the crusty Ray-O-Vac flashlight Viviani had snatched from her father’s toolbox. The girls gripped one another’s cold, clammy hands and felt their way through the darkness toward the boiler room. Viviani’s heart drummed inside her rib cage; even though she knew the plan, she couldn’t help but think of the actual red-whiskered ghost and his plans. For all her scheming, Viviani didn’t have a plan for what to do if Big Red really appeared!
CLANG. The radiator kicked on with an immense noise.
“The hammer!” Merit yelped. Viviani knew it was the radiator, but it sure did sound like a ghost’s hammer. She had to admit to being very pleased with this timing: Merit wanted to see a ghost, and Viviani would give her one.
Then:
Whoosh.
Mumble.
Thump!
“Shhhh!” Eva said, clasping Viviani’s hand. “Did you hear that?”
The flashlight flickered out.
Merit gasped at the sudden complete darkness. Viviani whacked the flashlight with the palm of her hand, and the light sputtered back to life.
Swoosh.
Thu-thump.
CRASH!
Eva squeaked. Merit and Viviani practically jumped out of their slippers. Eva turned and started skidding and sliding back toward the stairs. Viviani grabbed her arm, which made Eva jolt. Viv held the flashlight under her chin; lit from below, she looked like a goblin. Viviani winked at her, reassuring her It’s all part of the plan, remember? Eva nodded back shakily.
Suddenly, a figure scrabbled out from behind one of the massive seven-tiered shelves. A figure wearing bulky clothes, a flat woolen cap, and red whiskers! Carrying a hammer!
The flashlight clicked off. Darkness swallowed the girls.
Merit screamed. It was a true wailer: a deep, hollow, smothered-by-blackness scream, muffled by books and maps and rows upon rows of thick iron bookcases.
A flash popped. Merit’s camera blinded them.
Viviani blinked back the dots swimming in her vision and grinned to beat all. The plan was working! She turned the flashlight back on. The beam found the red-whiskered face, whose eyes were wild, terrified. The Fedelers were putting on quite the show!
But then—what? The figure ripped the red beard off, revealing John Jr.’s bewildered face. Carroll Case scrambled out from behind the shelves, too, knocking several books off the stack as he rounded the corner. John Jr. and Carroll stood wide-eyed, hands on knees, chests heaving in front of the three girls.
Viviani thrust her fist on her hip. “John!” she hissed. “This is not part of the plan!”
John shook his head, his eyes growing wider, wilder. The lump in his throat bobbed.
“Viv!” John shout-whispered. “That crash wasn’t us.”
Thoughts swirled through Viviani’s brain:
Our plan is dead.
The crash wasn’t you?
Why … what … WHO?
BIG RED!
Viviani’s eyes locked with John’s, and they grew rounder, more fierce, and her stomach lurched. Sometimes seconds can feel like hours; instead of whisking by like page turns, they thump heavily like a book dropped on a toe.
“Then … who was it?”
“Uggghhhhhhmmmmmm!”
The five kids heard it again: a deep moan, a guttural groan, wailing from behind the broken pieces of furniture near Papa’s workshop.
Viviani remembered her papa’s words about Big Red: Killed by his own mischief. And now he seeks to destroy it whenever it is near. If this wasn’t mischief, Viviani didn’t know what was.
Thump!
“AhhhOOOOOO!”
The flashlight flickered off.
Viviani smacked it back on and swept the beam across the faces of her comrades. Their terrified expressions all said the same thing, so at last Viviani shouted it:
“RUN!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Pranks,
Dewey Decimal 818.607
SEE ALSO: tomfooleries, monkeyshines, practical jokes
The five kids huffed and puffed and slid and scrambled up a flight of cold stairs.
“Edouard!” John Jr. hissed at the first landing. “Abort mission! Abort!”
> They clambered up another half flight. On the last curve of the stairwell, they rounded the corner and umph!
Viviani, in the lead, ran smack into the chest of something tall and dark and smelling like quite a bit of pipe smoke. She yalped.
Mr. Green lifted a lantern, and the jumping flame inside it threw skipping shadows over his scowling face. Of course he’d use something creepy and old-fashioned like a lantern! He bent over the kids. Was he drooling? Viviani pictured him clutching a knife and fork instead of a lantern and a broom. She stepped backward and nearly tumbled down the stairs.
“What are you doing?” he growled.
“Mr. Green,” Viviani gasped. Honestly, how could no one ever hear him coming? “The … the ghost. We heard it!”
“There ain’t no ghost round here! If I find you kids have broken anything, I’ll—” He stopped there, pinching his lips tight, but Viviani filled in the rest: boil you up in a nice broth. She shivered.
Edouard skidded around the corner just then, looking from the group of kids to Mr. Green. His role in the plan had been to follow the girls down the basement stairs, dropping items and brushing things against them when the flashlight “flickered.” The look on his face screamed, What happened?
“Go on!” Mr. Green yelled at them, and pointed up the last half flight of stairs to the apartment door. “Git!”
The six kids scrambled to the door. They swung it wide, ducked inside, and slammed it shut, backs leaning against it, panting.
“VIVIANI JOFFRE FEDELER!”
Mama stood in the living room in a familiar livid stance: arms crossed, toes tapping. She wore a thin pink robe, and the rags in her hair (tied there to achieve perfect pin curls) stood out all over her head like Medusa’s snakes. Viviani wasn’t sure what was scarier: her mad mother or the wailing ghost in the basement.
But Mama’s glare softened when she saw the terror in the kids’ eyes. “Is everything all right? What on earth happened?”
Viviani gulped. “Mama, we heard it! We heard the red-whiskered ghost! We heard Big Red!” Her heart flip-flopped just thinking of the unexplained moan they heard.
Mama’s gaze slid to John Jr., who shrugged. “I don’t know what we heard, Mama. It was probably just … a creaky floorboard or something.” Carroll nodded a little too enthusiastically.
“That’s not true and you know it, John.” Viviani glared at them, and John Jr. sheepishly avoided her gaze. Did he not want to get in trouble? Or was he embarrassed by how terrified he’d been just moments before? Either way, he was leaving Viviani stranded with her story.
Mama’s shoulders fell. “John. Carroll. Edouard. Off to bed. Now.” She pointed a well-manicured fingernail at John and Edouard’s shared room.
“Viviani, you too. Take your guests into your room. I’ll deal with you all tomorrow.”
She spun on her heel and went into her room.
Viviani, Merit, and Eva trudged to Viviani’s room. Merit slammed the door.
“You tried to trick me.”
Viviani looked down. “No. Well, yes, kinda. But the ghost is real! We just can’t summon him on command. You seemed like you needed to believe in a story, that you needed to see a ghost, so—”
“You are a liar, Viviani Joffre Fedeler. The others tried to tell me that you just like to have some fun and make up stories, but now I see it. Now I know.”
Viviani felt sick. “No, you don’t understand! We were just playing a little prank.”
Viviani looked at Eva, who lowered her gaze to her slippers. She’d be no help. “Merit, I’ll admit that we tried to scare you, but I didn’t lie about Big Red. Don’t you see? That noise—it couldn’t have been John Jr. or Carroll or Edouard! They were standing right there with us when we heard that moan!”
Eva rubbed her arms and nodded.
“Merit,” Viviani said, “there’s really a ghost down there!”
Merit’s lips tightened, but her eyes swam with tears. A drop slid down her cheek, and she wiped it away furiously with a balled fist. “I thought we were starting to be friends, Viviani. I was really beginning to like you. But I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks it’s funny to trick me or scare me. You wanted me to look like a fool.”
Merit crawled into her sleeping pallet on the floor and turned her back toward Eva and Viv. Eva silently turned off the light without meeting Viviani’s gaze and got into her own pallet without even saying good night.
Viviani flopped and flipped in the dark, watching the plaster ceiling in her room grow from black to gray to pale yellow. How could she sleep knowing her home was haunted?
She grabbed her captain’s log and scrawled inside:
Dear Friend,
Merit hates me and I don’t blame her.
Eva is mad at me and I don’t blame her.
She tapped her pencil against her teeth. Her stomach twisted as she wrote:
If it wasn’t John Jr., who—or WHAT—is in the basement?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Chores,
Dewey Decimal 331
SEE ALSO: jobs, responsibilities, work
The next morning, both of Viviani’s guests left the sleepover early, which only happens when the sleepover was a disaster. Viviani yelled goodbye, one hand on Lenox’s stony mane, one hand waving furiously, in an effort to get even one of them to look her in the eye.
Neither Merit nor Eva looked back.
Viviani sighed and laid her forehead against the cool stone lion. “I’ve done it now, Lenox.” She stayed like that for a long while, until her papa cast a shadow over them both. He laid a strong, firm hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s go, Viviani. You’re going to help me open up the library today. More chores as punishment for gallivanting around the library at night. Think of it as an opportunity to make up for scaring five years off your mother’s life.”
Normally, Viviani adored going on rounds with her father. But framed yet again under the guise of “punishment,” it suddenly took on a dreaded, ominous role. And so she groaned. “Can we move, Papa?”
Papa ruffled her hair. “Absolutely not. Look, I searched the basement this morning and found nothing. Red, let me share a thought from Mark Twain with you: You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. Sound familiar?”
Viviani’s shoulders slumped. The last thing she needed was a lecture on imagination.
Papa waggled his eyebrows and handed her his heavy, clattering toolbox. “Nothing, huh? Well, silence is a true friend who never betrays. Follow me.”
As they entered the library, they passed Edouard and John Jr., who had apparently been doled out their punishments, based on the mops and buckets they carried.
“Fact,” Edouard said drily. “There are approximately one million children between the ages of ten and fifteen employed in the United States currently.” He looked at Viviani, holding her father’s toolbox. “Now it appears there are one million and three.”
“Oh, you and your facts, Edouard!” Viviani huffed. “Have a little imagination, will you? You weren’t even there! You didn’t hear Big Red! Tell him, Junior, tell him about the ghost! It wasn’t creaky floorboards and you know it.”
John Jr. shrugged, and the bucket of dirty mop water sloshed. Last night, he’d looked terrified. Today, he looked embarrassed. “We heard something, yes. But a ghost? Honestly, Red, next time? Leave us out of your crazy plans, okay?”
“Please don’t call me that anymore. And you wanted to be a part of these plans!”
“Fact,” Edouard said. “You asked us. We helped.”
Edouard and John Jr. dragged their supplies toward the administrative offices up on the second floor. Papa put a hand on Viviani’s shoulder. “C’mon, Red.”
For the first time ever, Viviani was really beginning to dislike her nickname. Who shares a name with a ghost? “Could you please stop calling me that? It’s so stupid!” She immediately regretted the outburst, as one usually does with outbursts.
&nb
sp; But Papa just scratched his chin. “Sure thing, Firecracker.”
First, Viviani held the ladder while Papa twisted lightbulbs into sockets and twisted sentences into stories. “Did I ever tell you that Thomas Edison called two of his kids Dot and Dash, like Morse code?”
Viviani rolled her eyes. “About a million times.”
“Yeah? Well, did I tell you that they could talk to each other using just clicks of their tongue, in code?”
Viviani perked up, nearly toppling her father. “Is that true?”
“It could be.” Papa shot a single arched eyebrow bouncing down the rungs of the ladder.
Viviani sighed. She was quite tired of coulds.
Next chore: oiling the card catalog drawers. The oil smelled earthy, dank, and the oilcan thumped loudly when it was pumped, but Papa didn’t care. He was the only one allowed to make noise around here, free from librarian shushes. Fixing things means you get to make all the noise you want.
Papa squirted a drop of oil between his thumb and forefinger and considered it thoughtfully. “Hmmph. Just like squid ink. Did I ever tell you about the time that I wrestled a giant squid?”
Viviani tried very, very hard not to smile since she was being punished, and one must look as miserable as possible while being punished. That was an unspoken rule of being punished. “You did not.”
“Oh yes, the squid pulled a shipmate of mine right off the deck of our boat with one of his giant suckers—shhhhlllllPOP!—so I pushed up my shirtsleeves and dove in after him.”
“That didn’t happen.”
“It did. I wasn’t afraid, you know. You recall I was a sea diver in the navy. Glub, glub, glub, all the way to the ocean floor to pick up metal, rifles—all sorts of junk that sank after shipwrecks. So diving in after that monster? Why, I didn’t think twice.
“I wrestled that squid underwater, gulping sea and throwing punches, until I finally beat him at his own game.”
The Story Collector--A New York Public Library Book Page 10
