Gertie Milk and the Great Keeper Rescue

by Simon Van Booy

  “Always remember the Keeper motto: It could always be worse.”

  “So what do we do in the meantime?”

  “Go searching for more keys in the Spitfire and keep a closer eye on that rabbit!”

  13

  An Escaped Mushroom

  THE NEXT DAY BLACK clouds swarmed over the Garden of Lost Things. Gertie awoke early to the sound of rain lashing her bedroom window. She switched on a lamp and lay there in silence, watching water run down the glass, and hoping the bad weather meant a return of that all-important Keepers’ key.

  But Gertie knew the B.D.B.U. was unpredictable.

  It was Sunday, and so as usual, Kolt was most likely under the cottage. It was a ritual he had, to polish the various modes of transport, from atomic snowmobiles to Santa Cruz zombie-head skateboards with light-up wheels—very useful on twentieth-century city streets.

  She pulled a robe over her pajamas, then climbed the spiral staircase to the upper part of her bedroom. The rain was whipping against the large window. Gertie stood looking out at the rough, open sea.

  A part of her still wondered how she had gotten to the island, and hoped that one day she might see one of the ships Kolt said got beached occasionally.

  There was a book on her desk about pirate ships. She had become interested after seeing the film a few nights ago. Gertie carried it to her couch and sat down, tucking her feet under her. By the intensity of the storm, she knew there wouldn’t be long to relax. If Kolt didn’t come knocking soon, she’d have to go down to the basement and notify him of a return.

  The upstairs of Gertie’s bedroom was more like a workshop now that she’d lived there for a while. There were two large desk surfaces, coffee and tea cans full of pencils and markers, brushes, and different-sized pairs of scissors. She also had various reams of paper for drawing, mapmaking, and any other craft she fancied having a go at.

  Gertie looked up from her book on pirate ships, and scanned the cubbyholes over her desk—thinking how interesting it would be to draw a map of the basement. List all the things in the different rooms on the various levels. With 945 bedrooms in total, and thousands upon thousands of lost objects—it would take years, but no other Keeper had ever attempted such a feat. The Cave Sprites would be there to help. Gertie relished the idea of getting to know them better. Maybe she could learn to speak Cave Sprite with the same confidence Kolt spoke Mouse.

  But of course, all big plans such as these were on hold until she could begin the process of rescuing Keepers. She felt that this was her life mission now. Knowing that children, Keepers like her, were somewhere in the world living miserable lives kept her awake at night. She would never have said it to Kolt—but she felt deep down that rescuing Keepers was more important than returning lost things, and perhaps even more vital than rescuing her estranged brother.

  Gertie looked out to sea again. She hoped the upcoming mission had to do with returning the key to its Keeper. But what would this new Keeper be like? What if she didn’t like him or her?

  When Kolt finally made it upstairs from the basement through the trapdoor, Gertie was at the kitchen table with Robot Rabbit Boy playing cards. The rain was now coming off the roof like small rivers.

  “I had no idea the weather had turned!” he said.

  “How’s the cleaning going?”

  “I was actually trying to find out where those robotic hands have been coming from, but the Cave Sprites haven’t got a clue.”

  Gertie put down a card. Then Robot Rabbit Boy did.

  “You should have fetched me!” Kolt said. “It must be an urgent return with this sort of tempest. Have you been up to see the B.D.B.U. yet?”

  “We were waiting for you.”

  But Kolt knew her too well. “Sure you’re not just scared of being disappointed again?”

  Gertie blushed. “It might be more convincing if the three of us go up there.”

  “Mashed potato?” said Robot Rabbit Boy, laying down three queens to win the game.

  Moonberry bush branches were now rattling fiercely against the windows. Kolt fetched his bowler hat from the shelf and tightened his apron strings. It was time to climb the tower and find out what needed to be returned, where it had to go, and to whom.

  “Please let it be the key . . .” Gertie said, as they shuffled toward that fowl volume, The History of Chickens. Kolt pulled the book from the shelf, and the secret passage opened to the tower. Just as they were about to start climbing, Gertie noticed the Keepers’ key on the table.

  “Look, everyone!” she cried. The Keepers’ key was glowing again.

  Kolt and Robot Rabbit Boy turned quickly.

  “This is it, gang!” shouted Kolt.

  Gertie was so excited she took the stairs to the tower three at a time.

  Gertie told herself that she absolutely had to complete this mission. It was probably the most important one she would ever undertake. Not only would another Keeper mean a new friend (hopefully), but it also gave her a better chance of defeating the Losers’ next evil plan (whatever that was), which meant the opportunity to rescue her brother.

  Soon they were in the tower standing over the B.D.B.U.

  As usual, its pages flashed, hummed, and turned by themselves to reveal strange scenes. One picture was of an avalanche, and there was suddenly a mighty tumbling of snow across the page covering several paragraphs. Another was of a meteor ripping through space with a tail of fire and ice. A third image was of a tall beast ripping the tops of trees with sharp teeth. Gertie knew they were sharp because she heard the snap of tearing leaves.

  Eventually the whipping pages slowed, and the old book settled on a paragraph of illuminated gold writing. There was also an illustration of a knobbly person in a green costume with long, pointed shoes.

  “That doesn’t look like a Keeper,” Gertie said.

  They all stared at the strange, sickly figure on the page who was sniffling and rubbing its joints as though they ached.

  “Looks like the flu,” said Kolt. “Better stock up on ginger and echinacea before we leave.”

  But then in another picture was a glass vial full of green powder. To everyone’s disappointment, the glowing key downstairs was not the object to be returned. It was something from bedroom 469, medicine of some kind. It was this that the B.D.B.U. was telling them to take back, to someone called Dr. Girolamo Fracastoro, who lived in Italy in the late 1400s.

  “A vial of green junk!” Gertie said. “It can’t be!”

  The old book let out a deep burp and snapped shut, making Robot Rabbit Boy’s ears fly back.

  “Well. Maybe next time,” Kolt said.

  “But the key was glowing!”

  “That’s true . . . maybe the B.D.B.U. changed its mind at the last minute?”

  “There must be a mistake.” Gertie was livid. “I’m not sure we can trust it anymore!”

  “Come, come, let’s not be rash. It’s only one small mission to Venice; we’ll be home before you know it.”

  Just as they were about to leave the room, the B.D.B.U. sprung to life again. The three Keepers turned around excitedly. The book flipped and flapped, as the thousands of pages turned.

  Kolt seemed pleased. “It must be a double return! When we take two items back to the world, one after the other—like with the mathematician’s stick and the watch!”

  Gertie just stared at the B.D.B.U., waiting for the flipping to slow and then stop in the place with all the details of where else they would be going.

  With a faint, repetitive drumming of four beats coming from the pages, Gertie leaned into the book and read the name Sequoyah.

  “Who is that?”

  “Hmmm, it does ring a bell—but look! North America in the early 1800s . . .”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s dangerous, Gertie.”

  Once again,
the item was not the Keepers’ key, as Gertie had hoped. It was a piece of thick paper with symbols written on it. Kolt couldn’t tell why it was important, but was happy the item was conveniently located in the kitchen, hidden in one of Kolt’s books on the healing power of plants.

  All the way down to the basement from the tower, Gertie was quietly seething about having to return a pair of items—neither of which was the key. Robot Rabbit Boy seemed annoyed too, and kept saying “strawberry mush dollop room,” over and over again.

  “I know you’re upset,” Kolt said, as they descended the basement stairs. “You have a right to be. If it makes you feel any better I agree with you—that old book has been driving me loony all these years, but it’s still in charge. It’s still the brains behind the Keeper operation.”

  When they were deep under the cottage, a Cave Sprite appeared—probably Thursday, as it was quick and a bit pushy.

  Each Cave Sprite had once been the soul of a brave warrior, but the little glowing balls of light were now guides of the Skuldarkian underworld.

  “I just don’t get it,” Gertie went on, as the Cave Sprite led them down to level four. “We have a Keepers’ key with no Keeper, AND it was glowing!”

  “Gertie, stop, please, there’s nothing we can do. It wasn’t glowing when we passed it again on the way down here, the B.D.B.U. knows things we don’t, have faith. . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Mush dollop.”

  * * *

  ‹‹ • • • ››

  BEDROOM 469 HAD A peculiar smell that had wafted out into the corridor before they even got a Keepers’ key in the lock. It was like leather, eggs, and soil. Once they were inside, Gertie realized immediately that bedroom 469 wasn’t like the other rooms with things just piled up, crammed into corners, and stacked dangerously on top of one another. This was a library of sorts, but instead of shelves, there were glass-fronted cases running along all four walls, and instead of books, there were specimens. The Cave Sprite lit the room by hovering in the center.

  “Sorry about the smell!” Kolt said with a whistle. “But this room is all plant-based medicine in the form of lost herbs, powders, gasses, leaves . . .”

  “And slime,” Gertie said, watching a green blob move slowly around inside a glass bell jar.

  “Yes, slime too, along with barks, vapors, and fungi . . .”

  “Like those?” Gertie said, pointing at some glowing toadstools behind glass doors with a skull and crossbones painted on them. She recognized the symbol from her pirate book.

  “Deadly poisonous!” Kolt said. “But only to men with beards for some reason—oh, there’s really so much in here, Gertie, from powdered wolfsbane to crushed beetle wings, which are blended with unstable magnesium and dried kidney beans to make a formula that gives a person the ability to fly for about two minutes—or however long he or she can hold the burp for.”

  “Eggcup?” Robot Rabbit Boy said, reaching a paw toward the jar with the brown clumps inside. “Mush?”

  “No!” Kolt said firmly, looking at Gertie. “If he can’t get a plate of double-Dutch-chunk cookies across the kitchen without getting lost, then imagine what would happen if he learned to burp-fly.”

  Gertie sympathetically patted Robot Rabbit Boy’s head. “I’ll take you up in the Spitfire once we’re back from this mission,” she promised, “and we can pretend we’re in that space film with the gold and white robots you like so much.”

  Robot Rabbit Boy blinked, then snorted rudely at Kolt.

  In the center of the room were tall racks of different-sized test tubes and glass jars of pickled things. Some objects were in liquid that bubbled, giving off strange gasses. Kolt said these reactions often forced lids off, which accounted for the odor they were having to deal with.

  Gertie sniffed. “It’s like a wet forest meets . . . very old shoes, mixed with rotten eggs.”

  “Sorry to dampen your poetic nose,” Kolt said, pointing. “But this particular aroma is from that giant fungus lurking in the corner. It broke out of its jar last year and is now moving around. If you see it, wave.”

  “Wave!”

  Gertie looked down and noticed several sticky trails on the floor. Then she peeked around the corner. A gray mushroom with a red top slurped across the tiles. It was taller and fatter than Robot Rabbit Boy—who must have decided that he didn’t like it, and went to wait by the bedroom door.

  Gertie stepped cautiously toward the creature. “Hello,” she said nervously. The entire mushroom turned and bent its red top toward the sound of her voice like an enormous ear.

  “Aargh!”

  Kolt laughed. “Oh, it likes you!”

  “You speak Mushroom too?”

  “No, but when it’s afraid, it fires hundreds of tiny spikes.”

  “Thanks for telling me now!”

  Then the Cave Sprite began blinking. Gertie and Kolt followed it to a cabinet of glass vials.

  “This must be it,” Kolt said, opening the door and taking out the glowing glass bottle of green powder.

  Then Kolt led Gertie to another part of the room. He took two small bags and two little spoons out of his pocket.

  “We’re short on growing spice,” Kolt explained. “If you’ll excuse the pun.”

  Gertie watched him take the top off a glass jar and scoop some powder with a teaspoon into one of the bags. Then she looked around. “What’s the other bag for?”

  “The complete opposite herb—shrinking spice,” Kolt told her, reaching into another glass jar. This powder looked exactly the same as the other one. Kolt brought up a heaped teaspoon carefully.

  “Don’t you have to measure it?”

  “Not really,” Kolt said. “One is for growing, and one is for shrinking, like in that book Alice in Wonderland. You only need a pinch to feel the effects. That author must have gotten hold of some.”

  Gertie stared at the two jars. “But they look the same. How do you know the difference?”

  “I keep them in different pockets,” Kolt said. “A big pocket for growing spice, and a little one for shrinking spice. Ready to go?”

  “Shouldn’t we do something about the creepy mushroom roaming around?”

  “Live and let live, is what I say.”

  Then Gertie noticed the giant red top had turned to listen. She was worried it knew what she had said.

  “It’s such a nice thing,” Gertie added.

  “Maybe so.” Kolt nodded—then in a loud voice said, “But if I come down and find any glass broken, or specimens on the floor—then it’s back in the jar forever!”

  Gertie watched as the rubbery mushroom blades trembled, and the living mold retreated to a far corner of the bedroom, where it tried to make it itself look smaller than it actually was.

  “That should do it,” Kolt said. “I wouldn’t want to live in a glass jar, would you?”

  “No,” said Gertie, thinking about all the missing Keepers who were probably living in much worse conditions.

  * * *

  ‹‹ • • • ››

  NEXT STOP WAS THE Sock Drawer, one of the biggest rooms in the cottage, and accessed directly from the kitchen.

  At the center of the room was an enormous revolving globe, and beyond, rack upon rack of clothes from every period in history.

  Gertie had learned that dressing for the time meant blending in, which made it easier to return an object. Early on, Kolt had told her that being fashionable for them was actually a matter of life or death. For the trip to Venice, they would need clothes from the Italian Renaissance.

  For a while they stood before the enormous revolving Earth, mesmerized by the deep blue of the sea, and the way light crept along the continents. It was a beautiful sight, and the Keepers watched it spin from west to east, their faces like three bright moons.

  Kolt said it was a complete m
ystery how the enormous globe had come to be in its current position in the Sock Drawer. It was clearly too big to fit through any of the doors.

  “So remind me what happens with a double return?” Gertie asked. “Do we take another outfit?”

  “If possible, yes,” said Kolt. “Especially when it’s somewhere dangerous like North America in the 1800s.”

  Kolt gave Gertie a large cotton bag to put the change of clothes in.

  “Remember it’s vital,” he reminded her, “that we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

  After finding out which rack held the clothes for their adventures, they each went off and picked out things to wear. Once they’d decided on garments for North America, they searched a different rack for something that would blend in with the locals in Renaissance Italy. In Kolt’s personal opinion it had to be practical—but with charm—which for him usually meant a sequin or two. Gertie, on the other hand, didn’t know what she liked until she saw it, and could actually feel the fabric in her hands.

  “I think we should take the new key with us!” she cried from her dressing room. “I mean, it was vibrating!”

  Kolt shouted a reply from his own dressing room.

  “But if we run into any Losers, that’s a third key we have to worry about! Think it’s worth it? It wasn’t glowing when we came back from the tower, was it, Gertie?”

  “I suppose,” Gertie shouted back, dangling a corset in her hand, wondering why anybody would wear such a thing. “But the Losers can already travel through time because of Vispoth—so what use would a third key be?”

  Kolt gave a muffled response, which meant he was putting something on.

  Robot Rabbit Boy didn’t have a changing room, as there wasn’t much that fit his unusual rabbit body. He made himself useful though, by scooting back to the racks if a different size was needed—like a real-life shop assistant.

  “What is the late fifteenth century like in Italy?” Gertie said, appearing before Kolt in a long black velvet dress with a red pleated linen overskirt and a black hooded veil.

  “Oh, Gertie, you look more like a spider-woman assassin than a Renaissance maiden.”