The Project

by Brian Falkner

  Book after book flew through his hands. From Luke to Tommy to Ms. Sheck. Big books, small books, old books, modern-looking books. Archival cartons that were full of papers and quite heavy. The stream of books seemed endless, and still he felt they were merely scratching the surface of the mountain behind the painted green door.

  He hadn’t really imagined that there were so many books in the world, and it occurred to him that the amount of knowledge that had passed through his hands in just a few hours must have been phenomenal.

  His father had once written a book, a practical guide to dairy farming, so Luke knew how much work went into it. Each book he handed Tommy had been researched, written, edited, proofread, and finally published, no doubt celebrated with a party and a launch for the book, only for it to end up, years later, locked in a concrete dungeon in the basement of the university library.

  It seemed sad, in a way.

  The hours went quickly. The hand-over-hand action of conveying the books kept them busy, and simple chat filled in the time.

  “What did you do before you were a teacher?” Luke asked Ms. Sheck with a sideways glance at Tommy.

  She shrugged. “I had a couple of jobs.”

  “What did you do?” Luke asked.

  “Oh, you know …” She shook her head. “Just something different.”

  “Were you, like, an assassin?” Luke asked.

  She laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

  “Or a stri—” The words were choked off in Tommy’s throat as Luke’s elbow caught him in the ribs.

  “But it must have been something really secret if you can’t tell us about it,” Luke rushed out before Ms. Sheck could catch what Tommy had been about to say.

  “Or really embarrassing,” Tommy said, still a little winded.

  She shook her head. “No, nothing secret or embarrassing.”

  “Then why are you avoiding telling us?” Luke asked.

  “I’m not.”

  “You are.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Well?” Luke asked.

  “I was a singer,” she said.

  “A singer? Awesome! What kind of music?” Tommy asked.

  “I sang lead vocals for a local jazz band, and I had a six-week gig in Vegas one year as a backup singer for Michael Bolton.”

  “I thought you said it was nothing embarrassing,” Luke said.

  “Why’d you give it up?” Tommy asked.

  There was a long pause; then Ms. Sheck said, “I cut a single. Just me. A song I wrote, arranged, and performed. It got some local airplay and that was that. I sold thirty-seven copies at the local record store, and it was illegally downloaded about a hundred and fifty times. What with all the late nights, it seemed like too much hard work to me, so I gave it up and got my teacher certification.”

  “Wow!” Luke said. “You got a copy of it? I’d love to hear—”

  A dusty gray book with a tattered cover passed through his hands so quickly that he almost didn’t notice it.

  Almost.

  But he did.

  When he took it, it was upside down, but for reasons that he could never quite understand afterward, he turned it over as he gave it to Tommy. Tommy’s hands covered the title, but Luke had just enough time to register the spidery line drawing of a man in a circle, his arms and legs outstretched, and then the book was gone, on to Ms. Sheck and the next person, disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

  Luke stopped taking books and jumped out of line, causing a momentary disruption in the flow.

  “What are you doing?” Tommy asked, frowning.

  “Nothing,” he said, red-faced, getting back in the line.

  He hadn’t been able to see the title of the book, but he had certainly seen the picture.

  The man in the circle! The Vitruvian Man. That was supposedly the picture on the front cover of Leonardo’s River—the two-million-dollar book!

  Tommy’s hands had obscured the title, but he had seen the first letter. The letter L.

  “Get a grip, dude,” Tommy said, and Luke realized that he had slowed down and was still holding up the line. He forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, but his mind would not let it go.

  Could it have been Leonardo’s River?

  If it was, why didn’t the library know they had it? According to the website he’d read, the only known copy of the book was missing.

  As he was pondering this, there was a commotion from around the corner toward the storeroom. Luke heard someone say, “Don’t panic,” and thought that when people say that, there is always a reason to panic.

  Claudia appeared, looking stressed, a cell phone in her hand.

  “There’s no need to panic,” she said, not reassuring Luke at all. “But we’ve just lost the dam at Coralville.”

  “Has it burst?” Tommy asked, wide-eyed.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Claudia said. “It’s overflowed. They’ve lost control of the river level, and it looks like a flood is certain. We need to evacuate. Stay calm,” she said.

  But she didn’t sound very calm.

  6. THE VITAMIN MAN

  “You gotta be kidding,” Tommy said for the third time.

  “Two million bucks!”

  “If it is the book,” Luke said.

  “The dumbest book in the world,” Tommy said.

  “The most boring book in the world,” Luke corrected him. “And I didn’t see the title of the book, just the illustration on the front cover.”

  “So you don’t even know if it is that book?”

  Luke sighed. “On the cover of the boring book is a drawing of this nude dude in a circle. It’s a famous picture by that da Vinci bloke.”

  “I know it,” Tommy said. “It’s called the Vitamin Man or something like that.”

  “The Vitruvian Man,” Luke said.

  “There could be thousands of books with that picture on the cover,” Tommy said.

  “Give me a piece of paper and a pencil,” Luke said. He closed his eyes for a moment, replaying the movie inside his head of the book chain in the basement. He saw the glare of the fluorescent lights and felt the pressure of the deep concrete walls. He smelled the dust of old paper and watched as book after book traveled past. Then came the gray cloth-covered book. He watched it turn over as he handed it to Tommy, and pressed PAUSE on his mental movie player.

  “Here you go, dude.” Tommy was back with a pencil and some paper.

  Luke sketched the picture that was inside his head. He drew Tommy’s fingers splayed across the cover and the glimpses of other letters that peeked through between them.

  “It could be,” Tommy said, examining it. “You sure this picture is right?”

  “I’m sure,” Luke said, tapping the side of his head.

  “How do you do that?” Tommy asked.

  “Dunno, bro,” Luke said.

  After the excitement at the library, they had gone around to Tommy’s house, which was big and luxurious and overlooked the river, although it was on high ground and safe from any flood. It couldn’t be more different from Luke’s house, which was located on the other side of the river and was three stories high, ancient, and creepy, like the house out of Psycho.

  Tommy’s whole house was filled with cool toys. He had the latest PlayStation and an Xbox, both of which were connected to a television that seemed to take up an entire wall. Each room was connected by a video intercom. All the windows opened or closed at the push of a button and automatically shut if it rained (like now).

  It wasn’t the first time that Luke had been to Tommy’s house, but each time he went, he shook his head in amazement.

  Luke was staying at Tommy’s that night. Tommy’s parents were out and not due back till late, something to do with the flood, so Luke and Tommy had microwaved some frozen pizza for dinner.

  It was raining heavily, and through the big plate-glass windows of the living room, they could barely make out the streetlights that lined the riverbanks. As
night had fallen, the shapeless black mass between the banks had seemed to come alive, and malevolent. The river had already climbed over its banks, but it was still held in check by the sandbag barrier that they had all helped to create.

  The streetlights illuminated the barrier, and they could see the swell of the river, rising slowly, creeping up the sandbags one by one.

  “All we have to do is check the library website,” Tommy said at last. “Every book in the library is catalogued electronically.”

  “You sure?” Luke asked.

  Tommy nodded.

  “Even the rare and specialty ones?” Luke asked.

  “You bet. They’re the hardest ones to keep track of, because of how they’re stored in the basement.”

  “But the electricity is out in the library,” Luke said. “They shut it down after we evacuated.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “How can we access their website when all their computers are shut down?”

  Tommy rolled his eyes. “Their website is not on a computer in the library, moron. It’ll be on a big server in a data center somewhere, maybe not even in Iowa.”

  “I knew that,” Luke said. He actually had known that, if he had bothered to think before opening his mouth.

  “So let’s find out,” Tommy said.

  Tommy had his own laptop, with a wireless connection. He got it from his bedroom and put it down on the carpet in front of them.

  “What was the name again?” he asked, typing in the address of the university library site.

  “Leonardo’s River,” Luke said, and spelled it out to make sure Tommy got it right.

  “Nothing,” Tommy said a minute later. “I’ll try some variations on the spelling in case it’s been catalogued wrong.” After a while, he said, “Nope, nothing, zip.”

  “Try the author,” Luke suggested, and Tommy did, but that also proved fruitless.

  “Must have been some other book,” Tommy said. “One with a similar cover.”

  “Nope,” Luke said. “I’m sure it was the book.”

  “It’s probably just because you’d read about the book yesterday; then you saw a book that looked a bit similar, so your mind put two and two together and got six,” Tommy surmised.

  “But what if it was the book?” Luke said. “That would be cool. To find a book that has been lost for over a hundred years.”

  Tommy nodded. “Even if it is the most boring book in the world.” He jumped up suddenly. “Hang on, we might be able to find out.”

  “How?”

  “Follow me.”

  Tommy led the way to a room at the rear of the house, away from the river.

  “Mom has all kinds of books about books,” he said. “Maybe one of them will have a picture of the cover.”

  Tommy’s mother was a professor in the English department of the university.

  Tommy opened a door and flicked on a light switch. Outside, lightning flashed and thunder roared.

  “Do that again,” Luke said, and Tommy flicked the light switch off and on again.

  Almost immediately, lightning lit up the skies, and the house shook with thunder.

  “You always have the coolest toys,” Luke said, following Tommy into the room.

  It was Tommy’s parents’ private library, stacked floor to ceiling with books, neatly arranged on shelves of varying heights.

  “Why would anyone want so many books?” Luke asked, but Tommy ignored him.

  “Give me a hand,” he said. Tommy ran his finger along the spines, clearly not quite sure what he was looking for.

  Luke sighed and started on the other side of the room. The section he was looking in had a long row of classics, like Shakespeare and Dickens. He had just found a shelf of poetry, with names such as Longfellow and Wordsworth on the spines, when Tommy said, “Here we go.”

  Lightning flashed again, and rain hammered against the window. Luke was glad they’d made it back before the storm had hit.

  Tommy was flipping through a large cloth-covered book titled A Guide to Rare and Lost Books.

  “Did you know that a first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works from 1623 is estimated at six million dollars?” Tommy said.

  Luke whistled. Compared to that, Leonardo’s River was a bargain.

  Tommy continued. “An original copy of the Declaration of Independence is worth eight million, but the rarest book in the world is the Gutenberg Bible. It was published in 1456 and was the first book ever printed. A complete first edition today is worth twenty-five to thirty million dollars!”

  “Got a copy of that at home,” Luke said casually.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “We use it to prop up the coffee table with the wonky leg.”

  Tommy laughed.

  “What about Leonardo’s River?” Luke asked.

  “Hang on,” he said, still reading. “Get this. Remember your buddy da Vinci? If you found an original collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts, they could be worth as much as a hundred million dollars!”

  Luke thought about that for a moment, wondering what he’d spend that kind of money on.

  Tommy skipped to another section in the book and ran a finger down the page. “He was a famous artist and scientist, born in 1452. He painted the Mona Lisa—that’s that picture of the lady with the funny smile—”

  “I know what the Mona Lisa looks like,” Luke said.

  “And another famous painting called The Last Supper. Plus he invented all kinds of things, years ahead of his time.”

  “Like what?” Luke asked.

  Tommy turned the book around and showed Luke some pictures. “Submarines, helicopters, tanks, machine guns, solar power, stuff that didn’t exist until hundreds of years later.”

  “That’s unreal,” Luke said. “But what about Leonardo’s River?”

  “Here it is,” Tommy said. “A whole page on it, and there’s a picture of the cover.”

  He held up Luke’s drawing, comparing it to the picture in the book.

  Luke wrenched the book from him and stared closely at it. “That’s the book I saw in the library,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Tommy asked.

  “Does a cow lift its tail to fart?”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow. “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. What are we going to do?” Tommy asked.

  “About what?” Luke looked at him blankly.

  “The book, moron.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Tommy stabbed a finger at the picture of the cover. “That book has been lost for over a hundred years. It’s worth two million bucks. We should go get it.”

  “Why?”

  “Dude!” Tommy said. “The library doesn’t even know they’ve got it. It’s been lost in their basement for decades. They’re not going to miss it.”

  Luke looked squarely at him. “It’s still stealing, bro.”

  “Finders keepers, if you ask me,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Your share would be a million bucks,” Tommy said, and that shut Luke up.

  Luke thought of their dingy old house that didn’t even have a TV.

  A million dollars would change their lives.

  “We’ll have to cross the river,” Luke said.

  All the bridges had been closed for over an hour.

  7. BAD MOON

  By the time they got to the footbridge, Luke was soaked, despite the heavy parka that Tommy had lent him. It was too big, and water got into places that water wasn’t supposed to get into. It trickled down the side of his neck and the small of his back. He was glad Tommy hadn’t insisted on their wearing the secret MP3 radios. They would have been soaked and ruined by now.

  But water wasn’t a problem. Wet would dry. The thunder and lightning, however, took a little more getting used to.

  They say that everything is bigger in America, and the thunderstorms seemed to take pride in that fact.
The lightning was hunting in packs, vast sheets of it striking in quick succession in different corners of the sky. At times it was almost constant, the world around them flickering with the strobelike quality of an old black-and-white movie.

  Thunder buffeted them from every direction, the waves of sound crashing and building on each other like breakers on a beach. The distant thunder came in long drumrolls, but the closer claps sounded like explosions.

  Usually, after dark, the bridge was lit up with dozens of large white globes standing on tall poles. But tonight the lights were all off. It seemed like an ominous sign, although it probably suited their purpose of trying to sneak across the river without being seen. Luke didn’t know whether the authorities had turned the lights off or whether the water had shorted some wiring somewhere. Along the riverbank on each side, the lights were still on, shimmering through the pounding rain.

  Enough light filtered through the trees that he could see the start of the bridge, where it joined the pathway through the park. Something was moving on each side of it, and he realized with horror that it was water.

  The water was normally about fifteen feet below the footbridge, but now it was lapping at its underside.

  “Get down,” Tommy hissed, and Luke dropped to one knee.

  “Contact nine o’clock!” Tommy motioned toward the auditorium to their left. “Gotta be a cop!”

  Luke could see a flashlight bobbing and swinging with the gait of the person carrying it, occasionally splaying over the side of the large building.

  “We’ve got to go now,” Luke whispered hoarsely, “before he gets to the bridge.”

  “Maybe we should …,” Tommy started, but Luke was already moving.

  It was probably just his imagination, but the rain seemed worse on the bridge.

  On this side of the river, trees overhung the bridge, and in the dim light he could see tree trunks sprouting out of the water where the riverbank used to be, swaying with the motion of the river. Their leaves and branches reached down, clutching at Luke and Tommy with spiny twig fingers, then pulling back, only to reach for them again, a little closer each time.

  They crept across the blackened footbridge, the sounds of the river right at their feet. The putrid smell Luke had noticed earlier in the day was much stronger now. The river reeked like a sewer.