The Sixty-Eight Rooms

by Marianne Malone

  She—and only she—who possesses this wish giver will know the power that I know: to be unseen yet ever near.

  Hear what I say:

  To be free.

  “Wow!” Jack exclaimed. “Does that say what I think it says?”

  “The ‘conjuring friends’ must mean magicians,” Ruthie said. “And she calls the key a ‘wish giver.’ ”

  “That’s so cool,” Jack said.

  “It’s true, Jack! Before I shrank for the first time, I was wishing so hard that I could actually be in the Thorne Rooms. But I didn’t make the connection between what I was wishing and what happened. And then I was wishing that it would work for you too! I felt so bad that you would have to wait in the corridor all night.”

  “Thanks. I guess you’d better be careful what you’re wishing for when you’re holding the key!” They both read the lines many times over until they understood more.

  “I bet the magic is only about shrinking; to be ‘unseen yet ever near’ means she could make herself almost disappear, but not completely. That was her wish. I don’t think everything I wish for would come true,” she theorized. “I mean, I couldn’t make the cockroach disappear even though I really wanted it to.”

  “That makes sense,” Jack agreed. “Or you’d have to be holding the cockroach’s hand for it to work. Yuck!”

  “And the ‘only she who possesses’ it line explains why it works for me and not you—the magicians made it just for girls!” Ruthie thought a bit more and added, “What do you think she meant by that last line, ‘To be free’?”

  “I dunno, but if I were a girl back then getting married off all the time to creepy old guys like him,” Jack said, nodding toward the portrait of Henry VIII, “I might want to disappear every once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess I would.” This was one of the things Ruthie admired about Jack—he could always see things from someone else’s point of view. “This key is five hundred years old … and so is the magic or charm or alchemy or whatever you want to call it!” Ruthie continued, trying to comprehend it all. She looked up at the portrait of Christina on the wall. “I wish she told us more, like how they made the magic and if there are any other rules.”

  “I think we just have to figure it out as we go,” Jack said. “I wonder …”

  “What, Jack?”

  “I wonder what would happen if you held the key now, here, in front of her book. There must be a reason why it was warming up in your pocket.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is that something is definitely different in this room. I’m a little afraid to touch it.” She knew he was going to try to talk her into it.

  “Yeah, but you can drop it if something bad starts to happen. Like if you begin to grow—or even shrink again,” he added, smiling.

  “Okay. Let me have it.” She had a hunch that this young woman hadn’t wanted her “conjuring friends” to create something bad or destructive. It was hard to explain but somehow she trusted the face in the portrait hanging on the wall above her.

  “Here,” Jack said, holding the key out to her.

  Ruthie opened her hand and Jack let the key fall into it. Immediately it began to feel warm in her palm, almost too hot to touch but not quite. Then it began to glow a brilliant combination of orange and yellow and shimmering silver. But she didn’t feel the signs of shrinking or expanding.

  “So far so good, right?” Jack asked.

  Ruthie nodded. She didn’t want to speak because, in fact, something was happening. Ever so faintly Ruthie began to hear something. As she stood there with the key glowing and glinting in her hand she realized what it was: a voice.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked Jack, although she was pretty certain he couldn’t hear it. “What? I don’t hear anything.”

  “Wait … shh.” She held a finger to her lips. The voice was getting gradually louder. Then something happened that they both witnessed: the book—which they had left open to the last page—turned its own pages back to the beginning. And Ruthie heard, quite distinctly, a girl’s voice saying, “Gentle reader.”

  “It’s her … it’s her voice! I can hear her reading to me!”

  “I knew it’d be something awesome like that!” Jack declared.

  There was no doubt about it: Ruthie was being read to by Christina, Duchess of Milan. With a voice accented by her native Danish, the young duchess spoke the words that were written in her diary. Ruthie read along, occasionally looking up at the portrait, which seemed more and more lifelike as she listened. Ruthie liked Christina’s voice. In a way it reminded her of meeting Sophie; she guessed they might have been friends if they had lived in the same time. When the voice reached the last lines, it spoke with such passion and insistence that Ruthie stood frozen, a shiver running from her head to her toes.

  Hear what I say:

  To be free.

  And then it was quiet. The voice stopped; Christina said nothing more than what was written. Then the pages began to turn themselves back to the beginning again, like some invisible rewind button had been pushed.

  Jack watched and waited.

  “That was amazing!” Ruthie said, handing him back the key. “It was all so real, Jack. She sounded like she was standing right behind me, reading over my shoulder. And she sounded so young—younger than Claire.”

  Jack closed the book. “I wonder how Mrs. Thorne ended up with it.” Jack was about to say more when Ruthie suddenly put her finger to her lips.

  “Shh! Jack, I hear something else now,” she said quickly.

  Jack listened briefly and then, as he went toward the entrance to the corridor, said, “I hear it too. That’s not magic. It’s your cell phone!”

  “Ugh!” Ruthie rolled her eyes at the interruption but knew that she’d better get to her phone fast. “I was supposed to check in with Claire! It must be later than I think. I should hurry. I don’t want her to call your house!” She ran out of the room, relieved that she had left the phone on the ledge. As she approached the unshrunken phone she could actually see the vibrations as it rang, since it was almost as large as her twin bed. She saw the giant-sized phone number of the caller ID that told her it was, in fact, her sister calling. The buttons were easily the size of pillows. Ruthie had to push hard with both hands to depress the green talk button and put her mouth up close to the microphone hole to answer.

  “This is a terrible connection,” Claire commented. “Your voice sounds really weird.”

  “Really? Yours sounds fine.”

  “Mom and Dad just called me to check on us. Everything okay with you?” Claire asked without too much interest.

  “Yep. Fine.” Ruthie thought short answers would be best. “How did the SAT go this morning?”

  “Fine, I guess. Who knows? I’m just glad it’s over.”

  “I bet you did great.” Ruthie could tell Claire didn’t have anything more to say. “So just call my cell if you want me again, okay?”

  “No problem,” her sister answered.

  “I’ll call you in the morning,” Ruthie said.

  “Yeah, but not too early, all right? I’m sleeping as late as I can!” They said goodbye and Ruthie put all her weight on the end-call button.

  Her head was spinning. Three minutes ago she had been listening to the voice of a long-dead teenage duchess and the next moment she was listening to her sister over her cell phone. The reality of the situation hit her: she had lied to her family in order to spend the night somewhere without their knowledge or permission. While she’d been in the rooms she hadn’t thought about it—the adventure was too great. But standing on the ledge in the darkened corridor, having to stay put all night with no one knowing she and Jack were there, she felt a little unnerved and guilty. She was just a girl in the city doing something she shouldn’t be doing.

  The huge space loomed around her, and for a moment Ruthie contemplated the distance between her real life and this adventure, which now seemed greater than the span of years between her
life and Duchess Christina’s life. Somehow that distance seemed like nothing now. She had the feeling that the five hundred years that had passed since this young woman had sought out a magic potion didn’t even exist. At least, not in room E1.

  THE USES OF DUCT TAPE

  ON HER RETURN TO ROOM E1, Ruthie found Jack completely dressed in the knight’s armor, practicing sitting down and standing up without falling over. He was having little success. She watched him for a minute before he realized she was there. Anyone else would have been embarrassed, but not Jack.

  “Man, this is hard,” he said. “I don’t see how they actually fought battles in this stuff!”

  “I guess the knights were all at an equal disadvantage,” Ruthie theorized.

  “Exactly. Hey, who called? Everything okay?”

  “Just Claire checking on me. I’m glad I told her to use my cell and not call your house.”

  “That could have been a disaster,” Jack said in a muffled voice from under the visor, which kept slamming shut. Disaster sounded like “dziszazcher.”

  “Help me out of this stuff.”

  Now that they knew the source of the magic, they both felt somewhat satisfied even though they still had lots of questions. It was time to do more exploring; perhaps other rooms contained important bits of mystery and magic.

  While Jack was putting the armor back together—which took him a few minutes because it is always harder to put something together again than it is to take it apart—Ruthie browsed around the room, wondering if she had missed anything on her first look. She walked to the other side of the room and opened the cabinet. It looked empty. Then she checked the far end of the room, behind the wooden screen.

  She gazed at the view out the window for any signs of life. The windows were closed, so she couldn’t feel a breeze or hear any outdoor sounds—although what she saw looked real—and there was no obvious exit from this room into the landscape.

  Then she went back to the cabinet. For some reason she had a feeling that there was something in there. It was dark in the cabinet, but as her eyes adjusted she saw an object that she hadn’t noticed before, shoved back in the corner. It appeared to be a metal drinking mug. She pulled it out to get a better look, turning it over to see if there were any marks on the bottom (something Mrs. McVittie had taught her to do with antiques). Onto the stone floor spilled a pink plastic hair barrette.

  On hearing the plastic hit the floor, Jack looked over at her.

  “I know Mrs. Thorne didn’t mean for this to be in this room!” she exclaimed as she picked it up off the floor.

  “This is getting weirder and weirder,” Jack stated. “Isn’t that the kind of barrette a little girl would wear?”

  “Yeah,” Ruthie answered. “It’s like the pencil—it just doesn’t belong here.” She looked at the bottom of the mug again. “And this mug doesn’t seem right for this room either. I don’t think the marks on the bottom are from England.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. McVittie once showed me that antique silver has special markings on the bottom so you can tell who made it and what country it came from. She said English stuff always has a lion on the bottom. And this is definitely supposed to be an English room.”

  “Yeah, but somebody probably just mixed it up. You know, maybe they were cleaning the rooms and took this out and then forgot where to put it.”

  “But how do you explain the barrette?”

  Jack paused. “I don’t. I can’t.”

  Ruthie couldn’t stop looking at the mug. It looked so familiar for some reason.

  “I know where this mug belongs!” she exclaimed as soon as it came to her.

  “Where?”

  “It’s from one of the American rooms! We can check in the catalogue but I’m pretty sure I’m right. We’ve got to go look. Maybe we’ll find clues about how this barrette ended up in here.”

  Ruthie was so excited; she was certain she knew which room the mug belonged in and she was about to run back out into the corridor when she stopped in her tracks. She turned around and walked to the glass viewing window.

  “Uh-oh,” Ruthie said. Jack turned and followed her gaze.

  Gallery 11 was set up so that the European rooms—the ones they had already entered—were installed around the outer wall, with the corridor running behind them. The American rooms were installed in a center island and had their own access corridor behind them, but the two corridors were not connected. And those rooms were some of Ruthie’s favorites: an early American kitchen with tiny children’s toys on the floor, rooms from New York City, rooms from the Revolutionary and Civil wars, even a Wild West room fit for a real cowboy.

  “That’s been bothering me too, Ruthie,” Jack said. “I guess we’re going to have to squeeze under that access door too.”

  “We’ll get small and run across the viewing space. We didn’t set off the detectors when we came to this part of the corridor, right?”

  “Right,” Jack agreed. “But once we’re over there, you know you’ll have to do the reverse bungee jump again.” He looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “I mean, unless we find something we can use to make a staircase so we can both be in the rooms at the same time.”

  “Ugh.” Ruthie cringed at the thought. “Why don’t we get into that corridor and see what’s there first?” She really wanted to avoid that whiplash-inducing jump.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” Jack headed out of room E1.

  Ruthie took one last, long look around Christina’s room (that was how she thought of it now) before she went back out to the ledge. She put the mug and the barrette in the deep pocket of her sweatshirt jacket. Jumping was the only way down, and Ruthie knew that if she could do it, Jack certainly could. He didn’t hesitate; he grabbed hold of her hand and she tossed Christina’s key to the floor.

  “Don’t forget your phone,” Jack reminded Ruthie once they were full size again. She stuffed it in her pocket. He grabbed the piece of nylon cord and picked the key up off the ground. At the door they shrank back down to five inches, flattened themselves into the blue-and-tan-flecked carpet and found themselves once again in the alcove.

  This time, instead of heading straight across to the other access door, they turned to the right and looked at the huge expanse in front of them. The gallery was dark; only the dim red emergency exit lights and the glow from the rooms far above their heads lit their way.

  “Wow,” Jack said. “This looks gigantic!”

  “We probably shouldn’t run too close to each other,” Ruthie suggested, even though she wanted to stay right next to him. “We’ll be less likely to be picked up by the motion detectors.”

  “Good idea. Ready?” Jack asked.

  “Ready. You go first.” She didn’t even need to say that—Jack was already bounding across the lumps of carpet. She followed after a good interval. The actual space to cross was probably about fifteen feet. To them it felt like a football field.

  At the door, Jack threw himself down to the floor, ready to roll right under. But he didn’t. Ruthie got to the door just after he did and saw what was stopping him: there was no gap between the bottom of the door and the carpet. Jack tried to shove one leg under.

  “It’s no use. It’s too tight!” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Ruthie asked, moving down the door a bit to see if there might be more space at another spot. She could barely get the toes of her shoes under.

  “Ugh!” she said in frustration.

  “Yeah, and the last thing we want is to get stuck under the door!” Jack added. “Might as well go back.”

  He was right; they obviously couldn’t get into the corridor under this door. Jack went across the empty dark space first, a little slower this time. Ruthie followed.

  “Why couldn’t it be as easy as this?” she said, slipping under the door to the access corridor for the European rooms. Once inside, they both stood leaning against the door, out of breath from their long jog, looking at the vast corridor. Th
eir dilemma seemed as big as the space surrounding them.

  “Hmmm … I wonder …” Jack was looking up at something far down the corridor, near the ceiling. “I think I might have an idea.” He sounded full of optimism. “I think we need to be big again.” He was beginning to walk toward the book staircase.

  “Why? What are you looking for?”

  “I remember seeing an opening for an air duct—you know, for the heating and air-conditioning. I noticed it before but didn’t think about it. I bet it goes through the ceiling beams across to the American rooms. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. If we can get up there, we could crawl through and come out on the American side!”

  Ruthie was skeptical but she didn’t say anything, having no better plan herself.

  “Ready to get big?” Ruthie asked.

  Jack nodded and put his hand out for her. Ruthie dropped the key to the floor and they returned to the staircase full size. While Jack was looking up toward the ceiling, Ruthie opened the catalogue on top of the staircase and started flipping through it.

  “How do you feel, Jack?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “I don’t know; I was just kinda wondering if we’d start feeling sore or weird after all the shrinking and expanding. But I don’t feel anything strange—not since the very first time, when my muscles felt a little sore.”

  “Yeah, me too. I guess it’s a really good potion,” he answered, like some kind of expert on magic.

  “Look,” she said, pointing to something in the catalogue. She showed him a photo of a room that had mugs identical to the one they had found in room E1. “This must be where it belongs, room A1. Now we really have to get over to the other side!”

  As Ruthie looked at the book, Jack was looking up, contemplating the vent that led to the air duct. It was about ten inches tall by two feet wide but it was out of reach.

  “I was afraid of that,” Jack said, mulling over the problem. “Even if we could reach it we can’t squeeze through when we’re full size. I could stand on something and put the shrunken you up there. But what would you do on the other side to get down?”