The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  ‘Perhaps your Pa should build that Whipping Machine,’ said the tutor in mock-despair, when he found Pearl’s work untouched after half an hour.

  Ivy looked smug. Her slate was filled with wobbly sums. Pearl could only see the sevens. Odd and sinister.

  What had she and Vally got themselves into?

  Pearl was thrumming like a violin string all evening. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t think. Pa had gone to bed early, on the doctor’s orders, and the last bright streaks of sunset were fading from the sky. Cole’s Book Arcade was golden with the glow of the gas lamps. She looked down from the second-floor balcony at all the shiny brass columns, the obelisks, the colourful books. The Book Arcade Band was playing, and the people were happy. It made her want to cry. She had known this place all her life. It had opened the week before she was born, and the Coles had moved in when she was four years old. She could imagine a world in which the Book Arcade did not exist, but she couldn’t imagine her world without it.

  ‘Vally?’

  He was pacing behind her, staring at the pocket watch he’d received for his birthday, Saint Valentine’s Day, a few weeks ago. He wound it every twelve hours even though it could run for thirty. Its little heartbeat hadn’t slowed once. ‘Hm?’

  ‘Did we do something very stupid?’

  ‘We made the best of a bad situation.’

  ‘But if we lose, it’ll be as if this place was never here. As if Pa never existed.’

  ‘Then let’s make sure we don’t lose.’

  Pearl didn’t know how that was possible. She had no idea what the game would be, never mind how to win it. However, she was sure that it would not be like playing a board game with Linda, who often gave her little sisters strategic advice that cost her the game. It would probably be more like playing against Eddie: a hero for his own team, but a ruthless bully to his opponents.

  ‘That’s eight o’clock,’ said Vally, snapping his watch closed.

  No gong. No gunshot. No thunder. They looked at the rainbows. They were all intact, from red through to violet. The Obscurosmith was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘There!’ Vally pointed at the skylight. The paper wagtail was dancing and tumbling in the air. It landed on the Ornament Department sign above them. It preened itself. From its tail, a paper feather broke free and began to spiral downwards.

  Pearl didn’t have her butterfly net. Below, the customers were tramping all about the floor.

  She lunged out over the railing and clapped the falling feather from the air. As she opened her hands, tiny letters in a looping silver script sparkled back at her. ‘Val, look!’

  Her brother leaned over her shoulder. ‘Follow me? ’

  The paper bird wagged its tail – and dived.

  Pearl and Vally ran past the Ornament Department and down the staircase, footfalls like tumbling apples on the steps. A group of ladies gasped and clucked as the Coles raced past them. They pelted down the next flight of stairs, between Toy Land and the Perfumery, and came out on the ground floor between Lolly Land and the Tea Salon. Pearl jumped the last four steps.

  Vally was breathless. ‘Where’d it go?’

  A young man moved on, continuing his browsing – and behind him was the paper wagtail, staring at the Coles with its empty white eyes.

  They ran across the Arcade. The wagtail teased them, flitting first one way, then another, always just out of reach. It came to rest upon the big central display in the children’s section. Pa’s books were arranged on steps, like Japanese festival dolls: joke books, educational books about animals, and the ever-popular Funny Picture Book, which stood in pride of place. The crossed rainbows on its cover were as bright as ever against a black background. But as Pearl came nearer, she saw that it was not quite the same Funny Picture Book as always. The words, which should have been as familiar as Pearl’s own reflection, had changed and shifted into a new verse – a sinister parody of the one her father printed on his covers. Each line was printed in a different colour.

  The famous rainbows of cole’s book arcade

  Now count its final hours as they fade.

  In seven wondrous rooms, you’ll find a test

  To pass before the next can be addressed.

  All must be solved in time for you to win.

  Avoid, therefore, the snares that lurk within.

  As it began, it ends. be good sports, if not friends.

  Pearl opened her father’s book. Something slid out and landed on her toes. It was a bouquet of leaves and flowers, too fresh and too large to have fit inside the covers. ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He’s had a full day to prepare,’ Vally said. ‘He would have set everything up like a row of dominoes.’

  ‘And this is the first domino?’

  ‘I suppose.’ He took the flowers, which were mostly red and blue. ‘Ooh, a Venus flytrap.’

  Pearl frowned. The carnivorous flower seemed like a threat. ‘He said we would play seven rounds. Where should we find the first round?’

  ‘We’ll have to look all over the Arcade. You take that side.’ Vally started off towards Bourke Street, leaving Pearl to take the Little Collins end.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ She hurried after him. ‘We shouldn’t leave the flowers. They might be important.’

  ‘Important for what?’ He didn’t stop. ‘I don’t know any games where you use flowers. Except that loves-me-not thing you do with daisies.’

  ‘Vally!’ She ducked between a pair of ladies with huge bustles. ‘They might have a secret message in them.’

  He was only a little older than her, a little bigger, a little further ahead in his education. But as he looked down at her then, Pearl knew he was lording every inch and every day over her. ‘And they might have a spider in them. But I don’t see one, so we might as well not waste our time.’

  ‘Of course you can’t see it, Val. That’s what “secret” means.’ She held up the bouquet. ‘There’s a special code you can use to send a message with flowers. Most of them mean that you love someone, but an orange tiger lily means you hate them.’

  ‘What do these ones say, then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The tiger lily had appeared in a funny story she had read recently, about a poor fool who gave his sweetheart the wrong flowers. ‘We’ll have to ask someone.’

  ‘I don’t think we should.’

  ‘The Obscurosmith never said we couldn’t.’

  He shook his head. ‘Bad idea.’

  ‘He’ll use every trick he can think of. Why shouldn’t we?’

  Vally struck out an emphatic finger. ‘One, if we start looking for loopholes, he’ll just find a worse one. Two, if we tell someone, they might tell Pa. And three, they might actually try to help and mess everything up for us.’

  He was probably right about that last part. ‘They don’t have to help us with the game,’ Pearl conceded. ‘Just the flowers.’

  ‘Who are you thinking of? Because if it’s Linda –’

  ‘Actually, I was thinking of …’ She hesitated. She wasn’t sure she could pronounce Mauritian with vitiligo, and she needed Vally to take her seriously. ‘Mr Gabriel.’

  ‘What makes you think he knows about secret flower language?’

  ‘He might not. But he’ll know where to find the books about it.’

  ‘All right, fine, we’ll ask Mr Gabriel.’ Vally gestured at the rainbows that shone down from the balconies on the first floor. The crimson bands no longer stretched from left to right. They were each missing a tiny piece from one end. ‘But we’d better not waste any time.’

  Simon Gabriel had big bushy mutton-chops. He spoke more languages than anyone Pearl knew. He had visited more countries than the rest of the Arcade staff put together. He spent so much time taking customers to find certain books that he knew the shelves like his personal library. If he didn’t know everything, he knew where to find it out.

  He looked a little sceptical when Pearl and Vally came to Non-Fiction Enquiries with the bouquet in hand, but
seemed glad to help when they told him it was one of Ma’s after-dinner games. He gathered field guides and gardening books for them, of every kind.

  ‘Now, that one will help you with herbs and vegetables.’ Pearl tried not to stare as he stretched to take down a short fat volume, making his cuffs pull back to show his skin condition. It was none of her business that Mr Gabriel had pale hands and brown arms, but that was different to what most people had, and difference interested her. She wondered if vitiligo was painful.

  ‘But what you really need is one of these.’ Mr Gabriel placed it atop the stack of books they had already collected with a satisfying smack.

  Pearl took it down and leafed through it. ‘Mr Gabriel, this doesn’t have any pictures.’

  ‘It’s a flower dictionary.’ He spread the book open on the desk. Every page had a left-hand column of plant names, and a right-hand column of words like wisdom and courage. ‘See, those are the meanings there. Every bouquet sends a message. You mustn’t ever give flowers to your beloved without knowing their meaning, young Valentine.’

  Vally cringed a bit. He was a gentle sort of boy, like Pa, but Pearl had the feeling he wanted to be boisterous and hard, like Eddie. ‘No tiger lilies, right?’ he said.

  ‘Certainly not! No snapdragons, either – that’s a flat rejection. English ivy, on the other hand, is practically a marriage proposal. Now, as for these ones …’ Mr Gabriel pulled the book towards him. ‘You’ve got a scarlet lychnis there. That’s brilliant eye.’

  Vally pointed to a set of delicate pink-tinged jaws. ‘And that’s a Venus flytrap.’

  ‘Yes, that’s deceit – where did your mother get these at this time of year? And this is speedwell.’

  ‘Telling us to hurry up?’ Pearl said.

  ‘According to this,’ said Mr Gabriel, ‘it could also mean semblance or appearance.’

  ‘So,’ said Vally. ‘Bright eye, deceit, appearance. Look carefully at a thing that looks like something … but isn’t?’

  ‘An optical illusion?’ Pearl said.

  Vally tapped his chin. ‘In every wondrous room, you’ll find a test …’

  And then it was obvious. ‘Wonder Land has optical illusions!’

  ‘Good thinking,’ Vally said. ‘Thanks, Mr Gabriel!’

  As they ran towards the funhouse, the electric rainbow lights arching above the doorway looked like nothing so much as a mouth.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WONDER LAND

  Wonder Land was usually dark and noisy. The customers would wander through its twisting passageways, laughing and yelling. They stumbled on the warped chequerboard of the Tiles of Madness. They bobbed and waved their arms before the four warped mirrors, making their reflections hideous. They twirled the wide brass praxinoscopes and watched the pictures inside come to life: a child chasing a hoop, a pair of acrobats swinging on a trapeze. At the Window to the Deep, they would gasp in awe at the glowing fish rippling through the dark water. They gawked at the Two-Headed Serpent, Terror of Toowoomba – a little pair of conjoined twin pythons called Bubble and Squeak. They marvelled at the Wall of Wonders: the Unicorn Horn, the Martian Rose, the Amazing Deadly Mandrake. Some of these curiosities, like the ammonite fossil, were genuine. Many were not, like the horn, which wasn’t from a unicorn but an oryx antelope. Vally felt a selfish pleasure in their secret truths, like a treat he didn’t have to share.

  But all that was during the day. Now Wonder Land was eerily quiet. Vally’s footsteps rang out on the floor. It seemed less like a fun darkness, full of interesting things to discover, and more like a dangerous darkness where anything could be hiding.

  Pearl strode past him. ‘All right, what are we looking for?’

  ‘Some kind of test, and some kind of snare.’ A thirty-foot oarfish reared into view at the Window to the Deep, flashing its luminous stripes in the black sea. The Window was a fortunate accident of magical failure. Pa had meant to create a Window Across the World, to help people learn about one another’s cultures – like an explorer’s photographic slide show, but live and in colour. He’d chosen the island of Java for the experiment. Not counting the attempts that had been interrupted, Pa had failed a dozen times to make the Window display anything but his frustrated reflection. The last attempt was a twenty-page mental marathon, which had taken Pa the five quietest hours of the night to write and left him groggy all the next day. Whether he had the wrong coordinates, or whether Java was simply too far away, the enchantment had missed its target completely. The Window showed the ocean’s twilight zone, somewhere in the world. But it was easier to take a steamer to Java than to dive a thousand feet into the sea. In a way, the Window to the Deep was a greater educational success than anyone could have hoped.

  ‘You won’t find it in there, Val.’ Pearl skipped over to where the mechanical orchestra was poised in wait for a coin. Then she froze. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Probably the Arcade cooling down.’ The building always creaked when the temperature changed, like the cracking of muscles in a stretch.

  Pearl looked at the ceiling. ‘I think it was thunder.’

  Vally stood still and listened. A low, distant roar was just audible, running under the sounds of the customers outside. ‘It’s the wind.’

  ‘I don’t remember it being windy when we started.’

  Neither did Vally. He’d been thinking about the challenge ahead of them, not the weather. It annoyed him that Pearl wasn’t doing the same now. He gave her only a shrug in reply, then turned to look into the Famous Figures boxes. His own face peered back at him from atop the miniature waxwork bodies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Ned Kelly, Queen Victoria. Nothing strange there – just the usual mirrored illusions.

  He didn’t quite trust Pearl to notice any differences in the Wall of Wonders, but he left her to it and examined Bubble and Squeak. The pythons raised their heads, tongues flicking. They probably hoped he would give them something to eat. Feeding them took patience – as well as time and dead mice, which Vally didn’t have. Bubble and Squeak didn’t know they had the same body. They had to be fed a minute or two apart, each head hidden from her twin’s sight with a piece of card, so that they didn’t fight over each other’s food. Just as well Vally didn’t have to share a body with any of his siblings. It was hard enough sharing a room with Eddie sometimes.

  Nothing was extraordinary about the pythons tonight. At least, no more extraordinary than the pythons themselves. Vally turned to face his reflection, monstrously tall in the distorted glass. Pa called this part of Wonder Land the Smiling Gallery, but he was the only one. Across the city, everyone referred to them as ‘the funny mirrors’. Was anything funny about them this evening? Vally stepped closer to the first mirror, where a short fat reflection with a giant head peered back. Tiny marks showed on the mirror’s frame. Vally crouched to investigate the bottom left corner, his reflection shrinking down flat and stumpy like a wheel of cheese. The marks became letters, lying on their sides. They were evenly spaced and neatly painted, as if they had always been there. B, E, G …

  ‘Stop staring at yourself,’ Pearl said.

  ‘I’m not. There’s writing on the frame.’

  She hurried over, tilting her head to read the message that ran up the left side of the mirror. ‘Beginning in anguish, surrounded by care. What does that mean?’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Vally, ‘there’s more at the top. You’ll find I reside –’

  ‘– in the midst of despair,’ they both read, tilting their heads the other way to read the message running down the right-hand side of the mirror. ‘I dwell in the mountains …’

  The next part was upside down. ‘Hold on, let’s start again,’ Pearl said.

  Vally, who was getting the hang of reading the frames, returned to the left-hand side. They read at the same time, following the words around the different shapes and sizes of the mirrors. Pearl bent over, in a most ungraceful pose, to read the upside-down parts.

  Beginning in anguish, surrounded by care,
/>   You’ll find I reside in the midst of despair.

  I dwell in the mountains, the plains and the waves;

  Seen never in birth, yet always in graves.

  I appear in the banquet, each party and game;

  The middle of war, yet in peace just the same.

  I am found in the darkness, but not in the light;

  In pairs or alone; but in crowds, out of sight.

  I’m silent in Heaven, unseen within Hell.

  Though absent in greeting, I’ll join your farewell.

  Vally straightened up and glanced at the entrance. To his relief, no customers seemed to have come in. Chanting about Hell and graves into crazy mirrors would have been hard to explain.

  ‘It must be something sad,’ Pearl mused. ‘Like grief.’

  Vally scanned the riddle. Each party seemed to imply that a celebration was impossible without it. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Death.’

  Death could be found in darkness or light – and the line about parties spoiled it, too. ‘No.’

  ‘Bats!’

  ‘Bats,’ repeated Vally flatly. ‘Bats in the sea.’

  ‘Cricket bats are used in games, and the animals live in mountains and caves and the dark –’

  He exhaled hard through his nose. ‘It’s waves, not caves. Stop guessing and take this seriously.’

  Pearl set her hands on her hips. ‘I don’t see the point if you’re just going to throw away all my ideas.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m thinking them through, and none of them work.’

  ‘Well, what do you think it is?’

  Vally turned sideways to read the edge of a frame again. ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Pearl huffed, and muttered the first few lines to herself. Then she said, ‘Water!’

  ‘Water can be in the light.’

  ‘No, Val.’ She gestured at her shoes. ‘The floor is all wet.’

  A puddle was creeping across the floor. Vally’s eyes followed the flow past the mechanical fortune-teller, past the Famous Figure boxes, past the snake tank. The corner of the Window to the Deep was dripping.