Another Dreadful Fairy Book

by Jon Etter

  “And donkled.” Shade smirked. “Especially donkled.”

  “Feel free to use any door you choose to leave,” Émilie said. “So long as you do leave.”

  Drabbury stuffed the torn papers in his cloak. A dull red light glowed through the dark lenses of his glasses. “This is far from over,” he said, his voice the low rumble of thunder in the distance. “And all of you will sorely regret your impudence when I return.”

  “Doubt it,” Shade replied. She turned to Chieftainess Flutterglide. “You can leave too, saphead.”

  “I will, but mark my words, I will not rest until your library is out of my village!” Chieftainess Flutterglide declared.

  “Come, Chieftainess, I believe we have much to discuss,” the bugbear said. The two stormed out, slamming the door behind them.

  Now before I recount Johannes’s wondrous discovery that sends Shade off on the adventure of a lifetime, I feel I must address the elephant in the room. By this I mean something that may be troubling you that you, kind Reader, are far too polite to bring up even though it looms here between us, and I do not mean Yoshini, our beloved family elephant. She, of course, would not be allowed here in my study as I narrate this. As a point of fact, she has only ever been in the house the one time, when my dear daughter Quella sneaked her in during a sleepover, and she (Yoshini, not Quella) made quite a mess of the solarium and stripped half the plants in the arboretum of their foliage before settling in for a nap in the grand hall. Never again.

  No, the proverbial (as opposed to literal) elephant in the room is Grand Scrutinizer Norwell Drabbury’s insistence on the removal of books that he deems “corrupting” and “inappropriate” from the Grand Library of Elfame. Given my objections to you reading this and Mr. Etter’s previous terrible tome, you might very well assume that I agree with Mr. Drabbury’s demands. You assume wrong. While I definitely do not believe you should be reading this book, and while I do believe that these dreadful fairy books are in no way morally improving, I do believe that the choice to read them or not—and I do so wish you had chosen “not”—should be up to you and you alone, as should be the case with most books and readers.

  So there you have it. As the saying goes, when you assume, you . . . very likely will reach the wrong conclusion. Or something to that effect. I don’t recall the exact saying at the moment. Well, no matter—we have a dreadful tale to continue.

  In which we learn there is more to

  Radishbottom than meets the eye . . .

  “Dewey! Caxton!” François shouted as he and Émilie headed up the ramp. “To our office! We must ’ave ze reorganization and create ze section for children, allons y!”

  Shade heard a little squeal of joy just before a brownie with a pointy beard in a brown three-piece suit raced out of the stacks on the main floor and up the ramp after the head librarians. There was nothing Dewey, their collections chief, loved more than a good reorganization. With a heavy sigh and muttering several rude words, Caxton trudged behind them.

  While excited to create a children’s section, Shade was infuriated by Chieftainess Flutterglide and the bugbear. “And the day just started,” Shade said. “What more could happen?”

  Actually, a good deal more can happen over the course of a day, as you well know, kind Reader. For example, yesterday between my morning toast and tea and my afternoon toast and tea, approximately forty-seven and a half things occurred in my life. Which, now that I think of it, is exactly the same number of things that occurred during that time on the previous day. And the day before that. And the day before that … Hmm . . . I’ll have to mull that over later, but getting back to my original point, an awful lot can happen during the day, and you, being such an astute and knowledgeable Reader, no doubt expect that more will happen to Shade. And while this story may disappoint you on many other levels, it will not on this particular point.

  Shade felt a soft tap on her shoulder. Johannes stood there, a smile on his muzzle and a twinkle in his green cat eyes. “Please to come vith me, Fraulein Shade, for I have made a most vonderful discovery.”

  Johannes led Shade to a room that branched off the central spiral. It had no windows and was instead lit by wall sconces shaped like fireflies, their wings spread and magical fires burning within their glass tails. Filling the room were tables covered in books. Some were missing covers, some had broken spines, some were charred by fire, some were warped and stained by water—all were in need of repair. In her six months living in the Grand Library, Shade had never seen this room before. “Is this where you fix up the books?”

  “Ja, and this is vere I make my discovery.” Johannes picked up a book from a nearby table.

  Shade instantly recognized the blue leather-bound book, the only one that had survived the fire that had robbed her of her Pleasant Hollow home. As a child, it had taught her about all the places in Elfame that she had never seen, and six months ago its sometimes accurate guidance had helped her find her way to her current home. “It’s my copy of Radishbottom’s Traveling in the Greater Kingdom,” she said. “I donated that to the library when I came here.”

  “Ja, vell, since ve already have copies of it, ve thought ve make of it the gift back to you, but first I fix it up a little. The library gets busy and so only now do I have time to vork on it. And ven I do, I make the discovery. Vatch!”

  Johannes placed the book on a table covered with jars, knives, needles, brushes, spools of thread, and other tools for book repair. He unscrewed a jar, took out a pinch of powder, and sprinkled it on Shade’s book. At first, nothing happened, but after a moment the book began to glow.

  “What’s happening?” Shade asked. “What does it mean?”

  “It means this,” Johannes said. He picked up a knife and stabbed at the book.

  “No! Stop!” Shade shouted. She watched in horror as the knife plunged toward the book cover . . . and then in amazement when the blade snapped.

  Johannes held up the handle of the broken knife and chuckled. “You see, the book is—ow!” He rubbed the shoulder Shade had just slugged. “For vy do you hit me?”

  “For making me think you were going to destroy my book, fuzzball,” Shade said, picking up the book, which still glowed with faint blue light. She held it protectively to her chest.

  “I vas trying to be dramatic.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “From now on, I most definitely vill not. Now, if I am not to be hit again, I vill finish vhat I vas saying: Your book has the protection spell on it.”

  “But it was damaged in the fire,” Shade said, turning it over in her hands, looking at the charred edges and slightly water-warped pages.

  “Only a little vhen all of your other books burn up,” Johannes explained. “It is the very subtle magic—the spell allows the minor damage but not the major so most vould never know the spell exists. I almost didn’t find it myself, and I am very good at the book magic.”

  Shade was confused. “So someone put a magical spell on this book to protect it?”

  “Ja.”

  “But why not do it for all the books we owned?” Shade thought of all the books she had grown up with that were now gone forever, books she had spent her entire life reading or having read to her as she sat on the laps of her father and mother. Books that had felt like part of her family. Even part of her. “And why this one of all the books we had? My father barely ever looked at it.”

  “That I do not know, but perhaps ve vill find out because of the other discovery I have made,” Johannes said, picking up a pair of tweezers.

  Johannes opened the book until the cover was at a perfect 90 degree angle, then pointed the tweezers to the spine. “You vill see that vhen the cover is open to this exact point, there is the smallest gap. And in the gap,” at this point, Johannes paused, carefully inserted the tweezers into the gap, and slowly pulled out a folded piece of paper, “is maybe the hidden message, ja? And there is another in the other end.”

 
Johannes extracted another piece of paper from the other end of the spine and placed it next to the first. Shade looked down at them, dumbfounded. “What are those?” she asked. “Have they been in there my whole life?”

  Johannes shrugged. “I do not know. I thought it best to leave them vhere they vere until I could show you. Shall ve see vhat they are?”

  Shade nodded. “You take that one and I’ll take this one.”

  She picked up the piece of paper nearest her and began to unfold the thin sheet. It read:

  25-10, 1-70, 310-2, 29-157, 47-42, 211-198, 68-9, 18-98, 151-58, 83-1, 261-111, 3-88, 50-10, 187-138, 19-6

  “It’s a bunch of numbers,” Shade said. “What’s on yours?”

  Johannes shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

  “It is the blank sheet,” Johannes said, holding up the unfolded paper.

  “Why would anyone go to the trouble of hiding a blank sheet like that? That doesn’t make any sense.” Shade snatched the paper from Johannes’s hand and glared at it as if looking at the paper hard enough would make words miraculously appear there, just as you have tried to do when you’ve been assigned essays by your teacher about what you did on summer vacation, what you want to be if you grow up, which Victorian essayist you would most want to have tea with (other than Matthew Arnold because, as your teacher pointed out, every child wishes they could have tea with Matthew Arnold), and such.

  However, unlike your attempts to make words appear on a blank page by staring at it, Shade’s were successful.

  In which our plot really gets rolling . . .

  As Shade stared, words written in her father’s hand slowly appeared.

  “More bibliomancy! The letter that only the intended recipient can read!” Johannes gasped.

  “But my dad didn’t know any magic,” Shade said.

  “Apparently, he did,” Johannes replied. “Vhy, ve have right here so far examples of two of the six types of bibliomancy. First, ve have . . . ”

  But Johannes’s enthusiastic explanation of book magic fell on deaf ears as Shade read the words written by her late father whom she missed so much:

  Dear Shade,

  If you’re reading this, then I must be gone. However it happened, I am so sorry to leave you there alone—first your mother in that horrible war and now me—but I know that you will be fine. You’ve grown into such a clever sprite, more than capable of taking care of herself.

  When I felt you were old enough, I planned on revealing this great family secret: I, like my father and his father before him, am part of a secret society. Long ago, in the center of Elfame stood a great library—the Great Library—until dark forces sacked and burned it to the ground. But the head librarian, Alexandria, and five of her most trusted aides escaped, saving as many books as possible. Your great-grandfather, Moonshadow Riverwest, was one of those aides, and the books he rescued are our books.

  One book was especially coveted by the enemy: one that supposedly could bring about the downfall of the Seelie Court or the Sluagh Horde. Alexandria knew that it was too important to destroy but too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands, and it and the most rare and valuable books she saved must be hidden until true scholars could keep them safe. Before she left, she gave each aide the location written in code and a codebook. When they or their descendants felt the time was right, they were to come together and bring the lost knowledge of the past back to the world. Such has been my mission, which I now pass on to you.

  One more thing I need you to know: As much as I have loved books—and I have truly loved them—there’s one thing I have loved more, and that is you, my darling little bookworm and dearest daughter.

  —Dad

  Shade gawped at the letter. First I learn that my mother was one of the most feared warriors in all of Elfame, and now there’s this! Do all parents keep secrets from their children? she wondered.

  “That explains the first sheet,” Johannes beamed. “It is written in the book code!”

  “The what?”

  “The book code. The first number before the dash, this is the page in the book to turn to, and the second number, this is the vord on that page you use to make the message.”

  “Then let’s do some translating,” Shade said resolutely, trying to push her confused feelings about her father aside.

  The two rifled quickly through the book, jotting down a word from the front and then one from the back and then one from the middle and then one from somewhere else, their fingers flying and their quill scribbling until the final word was written and they stopped and read: squoosh up your face pick your nose then in the banana patch mambo dog faced.

  Shade frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Johannes cocked his head to the side in that way that kitties do when perplexed, like your cats, Mr. Wellington and Major Tom, did the day your mother brought your baby sister home from the hospital and held her in front of them. (As you recall, they weren’t that impressed, but then she was a baby, and babies are inherently unimpressive except in their abilities to make an immense amount of noise and to expel a surprising number of vile-smelling substances.) “Ja. It is the gobbledygook.”

  Shade stared at the words, hoping that somehow they would change as she stared at them, just as the letter had sprung into view. This time, however, nothing changed. Then she thought of the letter. “There were five aides, right?”

  “Ja.”

  “And each one was given a copy of this coded message and a book and were told that one day they would find one another and go find the hidden books.”

  “Ja.”

  “That’s it! Radishbottom’s book isn’t the key to the code—it’s one of the keys to the code. Each fairy must have been given a different book. Some of the numbers in the message come from this book and some must come from each of the other four. The only way to translate it is to have all five books and then figure out which words from which books make sense together.”

  “And how are ve to find out vhat the other four books are?”

  Shade crossed her arms. “I’m going to do what my father wanted me to do. I’m going to find the other bookkeepers, whoever and wherever they are.”

  “And vhere vill you start looking?”

  Shade’s face dropped as she realized that she had no idea. She looked down, dejected, then she noticed a word hastily scrawled in pencil on the back of her father’s note: “Cottinghamtownshireborough.” She jabbed the word with her finger. “That’s where.”

  Johannes looked at her, eyes wide with admiration. Then he cocked his head. “And do you know vere Cottinghamtownshireborough is?”

  “No. Fortunately, we’ve got a lot of books here that can tell me where it is.” She turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

  In which everybody’s favorite ne’er-

  do-wells return . . .

  A quick peek at a couple of maps revealed that Cottinghamtownshireborough was a small fairy village in the northeast, not far from the door marked “Meadowbrook.” In spite of her resolute words, Shade was hesitant to go. As much as she wanted to fulfill this great dream that had been shared by three generations in her family, she really didn’t want to leave the comforts and joys of the library. Living and working there fulfilled her childhood dreams, and she had risked so many dangers to get there. The library had more books than could be read in a lifetime and intelligent people to talk about them with. What more could anyone want?

  But this is what Dad would want, Shade concluded. I have to do it for him.

  Shade rushed off to share the news with the head librarians only to discover Émilie gone and François locked in his office with Dewey, trying to organize a children’s section as quickly as possible. “I think it best that ve tend to the library business and discuss things vhen ve close tonight, ja?” Johannes suggested. Shade agreed and tried to focus on her duties but instead spent most of her time lo
oking at the clock, awaiting closing time. It’s much like the time when you failed that math quiz and accidentally tied your shoe to your desk at school because you were too eager for the night to come so that you could see your sweet little Nana Svetlana’s debut (and, as it turned out, final) performance as a trapeze artist.

  But eventually the end of the workday came. After locking all the library doors in record time, Shade flew up to the head librarians’ office where Johannes had gathered everyone. François and Dewey hunched over a library floor plan, Émilie watched the sun set over the vast western sea through the picture window, Johannes paced, and Caxton leaned back in a chair with his feet up on Émilie’s desk as he tossed playing card after playing card into his bowler hat several feet away from him.

  “Ze Great Library of Alexandria?” François gasped, as Johannes and Shade shared their discovery. He put his coffee cup down, much to everyone’s surprise, and rushed over to an equally shocked Émilie and grabbed her hands. “Ze Great Library of Alexandria!”

  “Oui,” she said. A marble tear slid down her cheek then clattered on the floor. She turned to the others. “As children, we both heard tales of the great lost library run by the beautiful and wise Alexandria. It inspired us to create this place.”

  “And we ’ave read and ’eard ze rumors of books saved from ze great burning, but now we discover zem to be true!”

  “Looks like it,” Shade said. “And I’m going to track them down.”

  “Mais oui! Absolutement!” François agreed. “We must track down ze books!”

  “Great!” Shade replied. “Who’s coming with me?”

  Suddenly, the excitement drained from everyone’s face.

  “Em . . . well, I wish I could go,” François said. “But I ’ave ze children’s section to create, plus ze day-to-day operations of ze library and—”

  “And ’e don’t like bein’ outside.” Caxton chuckled.

  “But he’s a gargoyle,” Shade said, suddenly realizing she had never actually seen François step outside. “Aren’t gargoyles supposed to protect buildings and—”