She nodded. “Twenty-four of their shoes, anyway.”
“Can I touch?”
“Go ahead.” She picked up a purple silk pump and handed it to me. “Here’s the twelfth princess’s pair.”
The smell of magic was so strong in this room, and my nerves were so fluttery from everything that had happened, I couldn’t quite tell whether I was feeling my own excitement or actual magic. “Does it . . . I mean, is it . . .”
“Is it what?”
“Is it—you know—magical?”
“No, not the shoes.”
“Oh.” I was disappointed. Still, this wasn’t just any dancing shoe—it was the shoe that the youngest princess had worn to dance with the smart soldier who figured out how the princesses were sneaking out at night. Magic or not, that was pretty amazing.
“You don’t have the soldier’s cloak here, do you?” I asked. “The cloak of invisibility that he used to follow the princesses to the dance?”
Doc and Ms. Callender exchanged glances. “We’re not sure,” said Doc at last. “It’s supposed to be here, but nobody can find it.”
“Did it get misshelved?”
“I don’t know,” said Ms. Callender. “It might just be invisible.”
“Oh. But you have other magical things, right?”
“Yes, many.”
“Could I see one?”
“Of course,” said Doc. “Let’s see, what should I show you? . . . Do you remember ‘The Spirit in the Bottle’?”
“Is that the one where the student lets the spirit out of the bottle, and the spirit says he’s going to cut his head off, so the student tricks the spirit back into the bottle by taunting him and saying he doesn’t believe he’ll fit?”
Doc nodded. “That’s the one. Do you remember what the spirit gives the student in exchange for letting him out again?”
I shook my head.
“Come. I’ll show you.”
We walked down the aisles again, past rows of glass bottles, bowls of all shapes and sizes, dozens of spinning wheels, and on and on until we came to a chest full of cloths carefully folded and labeled. Doc took one out and shook it open. It was ragged and dirty.
“Wait, Lee! Test it first!” said Ms. Callender sharply.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to! That’s why I chose this bandage. I want to show her how very dangerous the objects in this room can be. Elizabeth, did you see the bottles we passed?”
I nodded.
“If you opened the wrong one without thinking, a spirit might come out and cut off your head.”
“Why couldn’t I trick him back into the bottle like in the story?”
“That only works once,” said Doc. “Our bottled spirits know better—they would never fall for that again. So don’t assume anything in here is harmless or manageable. Everything is dangerous in a different way, but everything is dangerous.”
Ms. Callender was nodding her round face in agreement. “Even the stuff that sounds safe is dangerous,” she said. “Like the pot in ‘Sweet Porridge.’ When you say, ‘Cook, little pot, cook,’ it makes sweet millet porridge. Sounds harmless, right?”
“Yes, I remember the story,” I said. Nobody told the pot to stop cooking until it had filled half the houses in town with porridge. The householders had to eat their way out. The story didn’t say whether anybody drowned.
“Okay, Lee. Show her the rag,” said Ms. Callender.
Doc took out a pocketknife, unfolded it, and—to my horror—made a deep cut across the base of one finger.
“Martha, will you do the honors?” Doc held out the rag. “I don’t want to drip blood over everything.”
“Sure.” Ms. Callender took the rag. “Elizabeth, do you have some small object you could spare? A penny or a pen or something?”
I felt in my hoodie pocket and found an acorn I’d picked up in the park a few weeks ago. “How’s this?”
“Perfect.” She rubbed it with the rag. Nothing happened. She turned the rag over and rubbed it again, with the other side. She held it up, smiled, and handed it to me.
It was heavy and cold, white-gray and shiny. It had turned to silver.
“Wow!” I said, staring. “It’s so—so cute! It’s like a perfect little silver acorn.”
“It is a perfect little silver acorn,” said Doc.
“Now give me your hand, Lee. Elizabeth? You watching?”
I had still been staring at the acorn, admiring the tiny silver scales on the cap, but I turned to watch the librarians. Ms. Callender had taken Doc’s hand and was rubbing it with the cloth.
The cut closed up as if it had never been there.
“Wow! Can I see your finger?” Doc held it out. I inspected it closely. I couldn’t see any sign of the cut.
“I remember the rest of the story now,” I said. “One side of the bandage turns things into silver, and the other side heals wounds.”
“That’s right,” said Doc. “And if Martha had used the wrong side, I would now have a silver hand. Pretty, but useless.”
“But that thing could save lives! Why is it here? Why don’t you give it to a hospital or something?”
“Yes, it could save lives,” said Doc. “But it would certainly also cost lives. Not just by turning people into silver, but by starting more wars than it could ever heal the wounds from.”
“I would say that’s the most important lesson of the day,” said Ms. Callender, folding up the cloth and putting it back in the chest. “Not only are the objects here extremely dangerous, but so is the knowledge of them.”
“That’s right,” said Doc. “Remember, Elizabeth: tell no one about the magic here. At best they won’t believe you. At worst, they will.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul. But lots of people must know about the magic. You do, and now I do. And I’ve seen people take objects out of the Grimm Collection when I was up in the Main Exam Room. Who are they? Do they know about the magic?”
“Yes,” said Doc. “There’s a far-flung, exclusive community of people like us—now, people like you. People who recognize magic and wield it.”
“Do they borrow things from the collection? Magical items?”
“Yes, members of the community can earn borrowing privileges.”
“Even the pages?” Maybe I would be allowed to borrow magical items myself!
“Some of them.”
“Wow!” Imagine having a magic cloth that could change things to silver in your own home! Or a cloak of invisibility. “Can I take things out too?”
“Eventually, I hope. But that’s another step for another day. Give yourself a chance to digest what you’ve learned first.”
“All right,” I said. Thinking about everything that could go wrong, I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of responsibility, anyway.
“Aren’t you going to tell her about . . . you know?” said Ms. Callender.
“The thefts. Yes.” Doc turned to me. “Elizabeth, unfortunately there have been some thefts of Grimm objects recently. And now we’ve been hearing about items that sound like ours turning up on the open market or in private collections.”
“Somebody’s robbing the collection?” I said. “That’s terrible!”
“It is,” said Doc. “And they seem to be replacing the stolen items with fakes—some of them, anyway.”
“Oh, no!” I said. Fakes, I thought, like the unmagical boots Marc had me trade the real ones for! Was Marc . . . ? I shuddered away from the thought. “But what can I do?”
“We need trustworthy eyes down here. We need to be able to rely on everyone who’s working here. If you see anything out of place, please let us know.”
“Of course I will,” I said. “And how do you decide which pages to give the test to?”
“It’s a combination of things. Watching how you do your work in the repository. Recommendations from former pages and other members of our community, like Stan Mauskopf.”
“Although the page we had to fire recently did have a recommendation from W
allace Stone, one of our patrons,” put in Ms. Callender.
“I don’t want to blame Wallace,” said Doc. “He was devastated when I told him we had to fire Zandra. He took it hard. He’s one of our most generous donors.”
“What did Zandra do?” I asked.
“Besides spreading chaos, we caught her substituting a new vase for a valuable old one,” said Doc.
“A magic vase?”
“No, just a Ming dynasty vase on Stack 7. But that’s quite bad enough,” said Ms. Callender.
“Wallace Stone felt so bad about the whole thing that he donated a group of related porcelain to the repository. He’s an art and antiques dealer, and he’s done a great job helping us round out our collections,” said Doc. “He was especially generous after the Zandra incident. I told him we didn’t blame him, but he still wanted to make amends.”
“So Zandra’s gone now and things are still disappearing,” I said. “She couldn’t still be stealing, could she?”
“No, I don’t think so. But it’s unlikely she was working alone. A kid like Zandra wouldn’t have the resources to dispose of a Ming vase. Whoever was behind it must have found some other way in—into the Grimm Collection, which is even worse.”
“Anjali said there was another page who vanished. What happened to her?” I asked.
“Mona Chen. She was one of our best workers,” Doc said. “She passed all the tests with flying colors, and she had some really good ideas about how to keep the Grimm Collection call slips safer. We’re trying to locate her.”
“Where do you think she went? Did she return the key?”
“Yes,” said Ms. Callender. “She dropped it off with Lucy Minnian. She said her family was moving, but she didn’t say where, and it’s surprising not to hear from her at all. Most of our alumni, especially Special Collection pages, keep in touch.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
“I hope so,” said Ms. Callender. “We’re putting out the word and hoping someone in the community will hear from her soon.”
“What do you mean, ‘the community’?”
“We’re a close group,” explained Dr. Rust. “Most of us librarians are alumni—former pages—and other alumni end up working in related areas. In other repositories, or academia, or research. Most of us”—Doc waved a hand at the shelves—“most people don’t want to give up their connection to all this.”
I could certainly understand that. And I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize my chance of being part of it. But all this talk of disappearing objects in this unnerving room was freaking me out, given Marc’s—what to call it?—irregularity with those boots. Marc’s irregularity, and the way I’d helped him.
“Well, Elizabeth, we are happy to have you here,” Doc said. “And please remember to keep your eyes open and let me know if you notice anything suspicious. Can you do that?”
I swallowed. “I’ll try.”
“Thank you. And congratulations on your excellent test results.”
“Yes, congratulations again, Elizabeth,” echoed Ms. Callender. “Now let’s get you upstairs to give Marc a hand in Preservation.”
As we walked past the wall of pictures, I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look. It was my own reflection in the Snow White mirror.
I didn’t move my hands, but my reflection in the mirror lifted her finger to her lips, gave me a wicked smile, and shut her right eye in a wink.
Chapter 9:
The Preservation Room
The Preservation Room was a long, airy attic, lit by a northern skylight. It was bright and chilly; drafts seeped around the edges of the window, and high white clouds flew by above. Objects from the stacks lay in heaps and clusters, neatly labeled. It was the sort of place where you could imagine the thirteenth fairy with her poison spindle, lying in wait for Sleeping Beauty.
Marc looked up when I came in. “Thanks, Elizabeth,” he said seriously, meeting my eye. “You really had my back. Sorry you got stuck down there.”
“That’s okay,” I said—and it was. Being thanked by Marc Merritt was worth any number of conversations with rude mirrors and dismal thoughts about the sanitary uses of witches’ cauldrons. And being let in on the secret of this magical place was worth more than all of it combined. “If you’d only waited an hour or two,” I said proudly, “I could have gone in there on my own—Doc just gave me the key.”
“Really? That’s awesome! Congratulations, Elizabeth! Welcome to the inner circle.” He held out his hand.
He had a beautiful, firm handshake.
“Listen, though,” I began, then hesitated. Should I say something about how uncomfortable I felt helping him break the rules? I didn’t want to jeopardize my friendship with Marc Merritt, no less. It wasn’t like I had friends to spare. But even before I’d been given the key, I’d felt a kinship to this place. Mr. Mauskopf and Doc trusted me, and I felt like I owed them—not just them, but the repository. Now that I’d seen the magic in the Grimm Collection and been entrusted with the key, I felt I owed it to this magical place to take the best care I could of it.
I went on, “Doc told me there’d been some thefts here recently. So did Mr. Mauskopf, the one who got me the job. They both told me to keep an eye out and tell them if I saw anything suspicious. You’re not—you don’t—?” I didn’t know how to put it diplomatically.
“Not what? Stealing things?” said Marc. He had that haughty look of his, like a prince being accused of something far beneath him.
“Well, I didn’t mean to accuse you, but . . . I don’t know, they trust me, and I helped you, and I just want to make sure . . .”
“I’m sorry—you’re right,” he said. “It does look bad. But I wouldn’t do anything to hurt this place. I belong here. It’s like it’s, I don’t know, part of me.”
He looked so sincere I put my doubts aside. “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. But you still need to tell me what’s going on. You pulled me into this and got me locked up in a pretty scary place! That was a big deal. You can’t just not tell me why.”
“Yeah, all right. I’ve been borrowing the seven-league boots. I have to pick up Andre from my aunt’s in the Bronx and drop him off at day care in Harlem, in between basketball practice and work. That would take hours on the subway. If I use the boots, I can do it in no time.”
“You’re kidding me—real seven-league boots! So you take them instead of the A train!”
Marc smiled. “Yeah—it’s a lot more fun than the A train. And like I said, way faster. You never get stuck in between stations.”
“But it’s—you know—magic!”
“Yeah,” he said. “Magic. You’ll get used to it.”
Okay, so it was silly of me to expect Mr. Cool himself, Marc Merritt, to express astonishment, even at real magic. I told myself to be cool too. “How long is a league?” I asked.
“About three miles.”
“So that’s twenty-one miles per step? Even the Bronx isn’t that far away.”
“Yeah, the tricky part is making my steps small enough.”
It did sound tricky, but if anybody had control over where his feet went, it was Marc.
“Aren’t you worried Andre will tell somebody?”
He shrugged. “Who’s going to believe a three-year-old when he says his big brother can fly?”
“But I don’t get it—why not just borrow the boots officially? You have borrowing privileges.”
He nodded. “I tried that at first, but they keep crazy tabs on the stuff in the GC. You can’t take it out more than once a month. Plus you have to leave a serious deposit, not to mention the late fines.”
“But why do you have to drop Andre off anyway? Why can’t your parents do it?”
“They’re both busy,” he said shortly.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean . . . ,” I trailed off.
“That’s okay . . . I shouldn’t have snapped at you. We better get to work. You know how to sew?” He led me to a table piled with cl
oth.
I shook my head. “That’s really not the kind of thing I’m good at,” I said.
“Okay, then. I guess you’ll be learning today. We’ve got to get through all this so it can go back on the shelves.”
“Is this from the Grimm Collection?”
“Nah. Just normal, everyday priceless treasures.”
Marc was a surprisingly good sewer. His hands could handle a needle almost as well as a basketball. Not mine, that was for sure—especially not when I was distracted by thoughts of magic and Marc Merritt. The sky was starting to darken and my fingers were riddled with jabs by the time I managed to tack together the sides of a torn tunic.
I thought of all the fairy-tale girls who ran afoul of needle-work: Snow White’s mother, who wished for a daughter with lips as red as the blood from her pricked finger. Sleeping Beauty, with that fateful spindle, and Rumpelstiltskin’s victim, locked up with the impossible task of spinning straw into gold. I had more sympathy for them than ever.
“Let me see that,” said Marc. I handed him the tunic. He laughed. “You really weren’t kidding, were you? Well, practice makes perfect.”
“Where did you learn to sew so well, anyway?” I asked.
“Same place you will. All the pages have to.”
“Who taught you, then?”
He got a dreamy half smile on his face. “Anjali.”
As if he’d conjured her, the door opened and in she walked.
“It’s dead quiet on Stack 2,” she said. “Ms. Callender sent me up here to see if you need help—unless you’re done already?”
“Ha,” said Marc. “With Ms. Thumbs here? You’re dreaming.” He winked at me.
Anjali laughed. “How gracious! You should be extra polite—you owe her. Don’t worry, Elizabeth, I remember not so long ago when Merritt had five big toes on each hand. Just call him Toe Jam and see how he likes it.”
They grinned at each other.
Anjali picked up an embroidered silk garment—I couldn’t tell if it was some lord’s ceremonial cloak or just a fancy bathrobe—and selected a spool of thread in a matching shade of teal. She threaded a needle and began sewing with quick, tiny stitches. It looked so easy when she did it.
The Grimm Legacy Page 9
