by Becket
Meredith stood a little closer to the two old robots.
“Who is this?”
Mr. Fuddlebee pointed his onbrella from her to the book man.
“My dear, he is called Opus. And Opus, this young lady is—”
“Why, little Meredith Pocket,” Opus said with a bright bookish smile. “It is good to see you again.”
Meredith was shocked.
“You know me?”
“Why, of course I know you, young one,” he said warmly. “I remember every reader who borrows my books. I think the last time I saw you, you were much smaller. You could only read simple words. You crawled up my spine and sat on my shoulder. I gave you a book called There’s a Monster at the End of This Book. Goodness, you must have made me read it to you a hundred times a day.”
Meredith was beginning to remember this. Yet it seemed so unreal. It was like a dream.
But she could not think on it much longer because, all of a sudden, a loud clatter came from behind the tall book man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Caretaking, Icktionaries, and Title Waves
Several books had leaped off the ground and had started fighting with one another, rearing up on their spines and flapping their pages at each other like angry ducks.
Opus the book man took a few long strides over to them. He bent low and broke up their fight. He set one book with a group of other books on a low shelf. Then he set the other book on a shelf much higher up, dividing them completely.
The two unruly books immediately calmed. They began flapping their pages with the other books around them, having a nice conversation.
“I didn’t know books were alive,” Meredith said in amazement.
Sir Copperpot swiveled around to her.
“Living books are the ones that are most often read,” he said. “Dead books are seldom read.”
“Or not at all,” Uncle Glitch added.
“The less one is read the deader it is.”
“Yet the book still has a little magic in it.”
Opus strode back over. “That is called Potential Magic,” he said.
“Are you a librarian?” Meredith asked him.
Opus gave a soft chuckle, his pages flapping all over. “Oh no, child. Librarians are in charge of ordering the library. My work is to keep the library from getting out of order.”
“Like you just saw him do,” Mr. Fuddlebee said to her, pointing with his onbrella to the books that had been separated because of their squabbling.
“I am a caretaker,” Opus the book man explained. “My work is to help librarians like you, miss. I separate good books from the bad, and I put them in the proper groups, not alphabetically, not numerically, not poetically or logically or whimsically, but by personality.”
“Book have personalities?” asked Meredith.
“All books have personality, young one,” Opus said. “They should be paired and grouped by the way they get along. It would be tragic to place a book on warlocks beside a book on accountants. I made that mistake once. Never again.”
“What happened?”
“The accounting books refused to acknowledge the existence of warlocks without proof, so the warlock books turned them into largemouth bass.”
“Opus is the Magic Library’s oldest caretaker,” Mr. Fuddlebee remarked, looking up at the tall book man with great admiration.
“How often do books fight?” Meredith enquired.
“Every chance they get, if they’re not properly grouped together,” Opus replied. “Books on poetry fight with books on prose. Books on politics fight with books on freedom. Books on religion fight with books on science. And even books on snollygosters fight with books on lickspittles. So I place them in places where they will get along with other books. What kind of library would it be if books were always fighting with one another because they were not properly grouped together?”
“Snollygosters and lickspittles!” exclaimed Mr. Fuddlebee. “Oh my, those are rather fun words to say. I’ll have to look them up in my icktionary.”
Peter Butterpig snorted at him questioningly.
Meredith nodded in agreement. “I have used a dictionary before, but not an icktionary.”
“Oh, I use dictionaries too,” Mr. Fuddlebee explained. “They tell you what words truly mean. But when I want to find out what words do not mean, I use an icktionary.”
“Why would you want to know what words don’t mean?” asked Meredith.
Uncle Glitch leaned close to her. “Knowing what words mean is good, but knowing what they don’t mean is better because then you won’t use them incorrectly.”
“I once looked up the word hippocampus in my icktionary,” said Sir Copperpot. “I was curious to know if it had anything to do with hippopotami. My icktionary kindly informed me that I was such a nincompoopish dinglefork that there was no way I could have one. And when I tried to look up the words nincompoopish and dinglefork, my icktionary threatened to politely nip off my nose.”
Meredith giggled. Icktionaries sounded like a lot of fun to her. She always thought of learning as an adventure.
“Are there many caretakers like you?” she asked Opus.
The tall bookman breathed heavily and said in a windy voice, like a deep flute, “There used to be many. But the WORM infected the mechanical candles in one of the sections—”
“Which?” asked Uncle Glitch.
“The Vaguely Victorian Section,” said Opus.
“My favorite,” said Sir Copperpot.
“I liked it too,” Opus said sorrowfully. “But the mechanical candles exploded and my brothers went up in smoke along with most of the section. I was not there and now I am all that remains.”
This news activated mourning programs in the two old robots. Sir Copperpot and Uncle Glitch wept large tears of oil. They took off their hats and hid their faces.
“They’re all gone?” asked Mr. Fuddlebee, hearing of this for the first time too. “Folio? Quarto? Codex? Omnibus? Leaflet? All your brothers?”
“They’re all gone,” Opus said, wiping a tear of ink from his eye. “The WORM burned them to ashes.”
“What did you do with them?” enquired Sir Copperpot.
“I scattered them over the Sea of Scrolls,” Opus replied. “It was a lovely ceremony. The Queen of Ink even came out of her Inkwell Kingdom to pay her respects.”
Peter Butterpig flew up to the tall book man and patted him comfortingly on the back with his hoof.
Suddenly, before anyone could say anything else, a riot of books broke out!
Great volumes of hardcovers and paperbacks, magazines and pamphlets, textbooks and booklets and thick manuals, they all reared up and formed into a large wave that came barreling toward the ghost, the book man, and the four librarians.
Peter Butterpig squealed.
“Oh dear,” Opus said, turning to the wave of books with a concerned expression. “That’s the section on love. They’re the most difficult books to herd. Each of them has their own opinion about what love should be. They get so hateful when another book with different thoughts disagrees with them. Now look at them. They’re so angry they’ve made a title wave.”
“Don’t you mean a tidal wave?” asked Meredith.
“No, it’s a title wave,” said Uncle Glitch, pointing to the wave of books that was growing larger and larger. “It’s a large wave of titles!”
“What do we do?” cried Meredith.
“The best course of action at this point,” said Mr. Fuddlebee, “would be to run as fast as we can, or in my case float.”
Everyone turned and hurried toward a door on the other side of the room.
The large wave of books was gaining on them by the second, gathering more books, and getting larger.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Waltz of the Robots
Mr. Fuddlebee, Sir Copperpot, Uncle Glitch, Peter Butterpig, Opus, and little Meredith Pocket all hurried as fast as they could toward the other side of the room where there w
as a little door. It was about the size of a shoe box.
When they finally got there, everyone wanted Meredith to go through first. The door was so small she barely made it. Mr. Fuddlebee passed through the wall after her. Sir Copperpot and Uncle Glitch folded up into little devices with wheels and rolled through next. Yet when Peter Butterpig went next, his plump little belly got stuck. The others had to take hold of his front hoofs and pull him through.
“Careful,” said Mr. Fuddlebee, “don’t tear his wings.”
The others pulled and pulled until finally the butterpig came through the little door with a pop like a cork from a bubbling bottle.
Opus, however, did not go through. Instead he called to them from the other side.
“I will lock the door from over here and calm the books with their favorite lullaby.”
He shut the little door right when the wave of books crashed against it.
For the next minute books could be heard tumbling one over another.
Meredith could only imagine the mess on the other side. She hoped Opus was safe.
She was relieved the next moment when she heard him stand up and start speaking.
“All right, little ones, you’ve been angry long enough. It’s time to go to sleep.”
His voice was like a soft wind as he sang them a sweet lullaby. It was about leaves of books falling from book trees in the Autumn Section of the library.
The angry books calmed. They listened like little children as Opus sang to them. Soon their pages could be heard flapping in gentle snores.
The music of Opus’s lullaby faded beneath another kind of music. It was tinkling and pretty, like the chimes of a music box.
Meredith, Peter Butterpig, Uncle Glitch, Sir Copperpot, and Mr. Fuddlebee now found themselves in a room quite unlike the last one.
The ceiling was a painted blue sky with billowy clouds. Painted birds were flying through it. And a painted sun was slowly moving from one side to the other.
Each wall was lined with bookcases elegantly carved out of the finest wood, ornamented with carved angels flying, vines coiling, and gremlins grinning.
Each bookcase was filled with the rarest books in the world. The many colors of their spines brightened the room superbly.
The floor was black and white tiles.
Standing in the middle was a group of robots like Sir Copperpot and Uncle Glitch, only they were not as alive and thoughtful. The WORM had eaten all their programs, except for a few simple ones like dancing and shelving books. In fact that is all they were doing right at that moment.
The robots were waltzing through the room in time with the lovely sound of waltz music that filled the air.
Some robots were dressed in gorgeous gowns. Others wore handsome coats and hats. And each robot wore a painted mask.
They twirled and stepped and leaped and bowed. Their clothes were a little tattered and their mechanical parts were squeaky and rusty. Sometimes a part fell off too. But the dancing robots shelved books, as if it were a perfect part of their dance.
As the waltz went on, little leaves of paper fell from the painted trees on the ceiling.
On these leaves of paper were the names of books that people wanted to read.
Without missing a beat, the robots took the little paper, waltzed over to a bookcase, fetched the proper book from a shelf, and let it float up to the ceiling.
Once the book touched the ceiling, a painted bird snatched it in its talons and flew it off into the painted distance.
Meredith watched this happen in complete amazement.
“What sort of room is this?” she gasped.
“My dear,” said Mr. Fuddlebee, “this is the Classical Section. It has everything to do with class, such as enjoying classical music and art, having politeness and class, going to a school for class, and properly classifying animals, peoples, and monsters.”
Sir Copperpot stepped ahead of the group. His robotic eyes brightened with delight. His mechanical hips began swaying with the music.
“Oh, I believe I recall this room,” he said wistfully. “Yes, it’s all coming back to me. Out of all the rooms in this magnificent Magic Library, this is my utmost favorite. I never knew until now how much I had missed it!”
Meredith had never seen his face filled with so much longing.
“Would any of you mind…” he said a little timidly. “Would any of you mind if I met you a little later? I would very much like to stay here and dance with this party. It has been such a long time since I had the chance to waltz while I worked with books. My mechanical heart is aching to get to it immediately.”
Mr. Fuddlebee’s ghostly face smiled kindly on him. “Why certainly, my dear fellow. Why shouldn’t you get back to work? In fact, I wish I could stay with you. I have not robot-waltzed in ages. Unfortunately, my ghostly dancing shoes are with my other ghostly suit, otherwise you would be in for some stiff competition.”
Uncle Glitch put his arm around Sir Copperpot.
“Listen, you old bot. You go off and enjoy yourself. I’ll look after the little one and her pig.”
Peter Butterpig snorted indignantly. He was no mere pig.
Meredith took Sir Copperpot’s mechanical hand in hers.
“I hope you have a wonderful time,” she said to him. “You have always been so kind to me. You deserve this now.”
The old robot smiled and nodded at her.
Then he stepped forward and bowed very low before another robot in a beautiful gown, sweeping his top hat off his head and swooping it across the floor.
“May I book this dance?”
The other robot curtsied automatically.
Sir Copperpot swept her off her mechanical feet and the two went waltzing together into the crowd of dancing robots, taking leaves of paper tumbling down from the ceiling, and fetching the proper books.
It was a lovely sight to see Sir Copperpot so happy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Paper Airplane Airport
Mr. Fuddlebee led Uncle Glitch, Peter Butterpig, and little Meredith Pocket across the room and through a fancy door on the other side.
The next room was full of zombie workers wearing white overalls and pushing carts of books.
They wheeled the books over to large paper airplanes folded from brightly colorful paper that had come out of enormous atlases.
Their book covers were as large as skyscrapers and they lined around the room.
The zombie workers did not appear to notice the girl, the old robot, the butterpig, or the elderly ghost. They were too busy. Some were loading books into luggage compartments in the paper airplanes. Others were guiding more paper airplanes to take off and land.
The whole room was a paper airplane airport!
The great spines of the atlases were the runways. More pages were folded into tall tower control stations. And even more paper airplanes were lined up, empty, and waiting to be piloted.
“Ah,” said Uncle Glitch, recognizing the place, “we’ve come to Atlas International. I haven’t been in here in years. I used to fly those paper airplanes. It’s starting to come back to me… I think.”
“Well then,” Mr. Fuddlebee said to him brightly, “let us see if we can jump start the old memory banks. I think I see an available plane over in the corner.”
All the paper airplanes in the airport were folded uniquely. Some were folded to look like large luxury planes. Others were folded into jets. And a few more were folded to look like old bi-wing planes. No matter how they were folded, the atlas paper made each one bright and colorful and cheerful. At the same time, they were also covered in several mechanical devices made of brass or copper that zapped with electricity and gushed out steam.
Mr. Fuddlebee led the group across the airfield to the plane in the corner. It was smaller than the others, and folded very simply, like a paper airplane you might fold up and throw in class.
Uncle Glitch called it a “puddle jumper.”
They climbed aboard from the
back and took their seats in the middle. Uncle Glitch sat at the front where there were several switches and buttons and levers. The old robot pulled down the pair of flight goggles from his aviator cap. He pressed a few buttons, flipped a few switches, and pulled several levers.
“I believe I’m doing this correctly,” he muttered to himself, recalling more and more.
With a little magic and a lot of machine-work, the paper airplane began slowly moving forward along the airstrip. Uncle Glitch gave the throttle a little thrust of magic dust and the paper airplane rushed faster and faster down the runway until it built up enough speed and took off into the air.
“Ha ha!” laughed Uncle Glitch in sheer delight. “This is fantastic! I can’t believe I had forgotten this!”
“It’s wonderful,” Meredith shouted.
“Tallyho!” cried Mr. Fuddlebee, waving his onbrella.
The only one who was not enjoying himself was Peter Butterpig. Wide-eyed with fright, he was clutching to the sides of the paper airplane with his hoofs. Although he was excellent at flying with his own wings, flying on the wings of another captain terrified him immensely.
He squealed at a horrid pitch when Uncle Glitch flew the paper airplane in quick zigzags.
“Ha ha! I’m back!” he was shouting joyously. “I’m a librarian again! What a wonderful day!”
There was a large opening in the ceiling where all the other paper airplanes were flying through, coming in and going out.
Uncle Glitch guided the paper airplane toward it, yet right before he left he gave one last quick twirl, over and around, like a daredevil.
Peter Butterpig nearly fell out. Meredith had to grab hold of one hoof while Mr. Fuddlebee hooked the onbrella’s handle over his curly tail.
The paper airplane soared out of the opening with a burst and began gliding gracefully through the Magic Library, smoothly and silently.
Uncle Glitch was an excellent pilot, although he could be a little mischievous at times.
