by Jon Etter
The Professor gave a two-note whistle and shook his head. “I agree with my partner,” Ginch said. “It’s almost nighttime and we no wanna be in the Bilgewater after dark.”
Shade frowned and crossed her arms. “And why not?”
“Well, it’s-a filled with the most sneaky, cheaty, crooked, no-good fairies in alla Elfame.”
Shade smirked. “Well, then, it’s a good thing I’ve got the two most sneaky, cheaty, crooked fairies in all of Elfame on my side.”
The Professor blushed, batted his eyes, and waved a hand at Shade as if to say, “Oh, go on!”
Ginch, however, was not so easily flattered. “Maybe. But you also gotta the human beans runnin’ around. You really wanna meet the human bean in the dark alley in the night?”
Shade blanched at this. She, like most fairies, was more than a little scared of human beings, which may sound silly to you, good Reader, especially if you’re thinking specifically of your dear, sweet Aunt Agnes and her wonderful hand-knit socks—So cute, so cozy!—but fairies have good reason to fear us, as we are taller and stronger than almost every type of fairy and, more importantly and horribly for them, we can handle iron, the touch of which burns fairies as if it were red hot. Fortunately for them, we humans cannot see fairies except at certain times (dawn, dusk, Halloween, the Feast of St. Figgymigg, etc.) or under special circumstances (charming, abduction, being the half-nephew of a cheesemaker, and so forth). Because of this, most fairies prefer to live far away from humans or, if they do live amongst us, tend to stick to isolated farmhouses or tiny country villages in those rare places where the fairylands and our world overlap.
There are, however, some especially bold and cunning fairies who live largely unbeknownst to us in towns and even bustling cities. You know that vacant lot three blocks from your house? Or that corner of the public park where nobody ever plays? And those shops downtown that seem much smaller on the inside than they do on the outside, as if there were more space that you can’t see? Well, more likely than not, all those places where nobody goes and that seem empty are, in fact, fairy buildings teeming with the most daring and thieving fairies around, for the main reason these fairies choose to live amongst us is to steal from us. Ever wonder why you always lose one of a pair of socks? Fairies steal them to use as sleeping bags and tea cozies. That half-sandwich you were saving that you think your brother Norbert ate? Possibly eaten by a fairy. Possibly, but in all likelihood it was Norbert, no matter what he claims—now that he’s a teenager, he really does have the appetite of a starving hippopotamus with a tapeworm, doesn’t he?
“No,” Shade answered Ginch, “I do not want to run into a human in a dark alley at night. I also don’t want another G.L.U.G.er to get attacked because we decided to get a good night’s sleep and eat an extra-large breakfast. Is that what you want?”
Ginch shrugged. “I no know. Whatta we have for the breakfast?” The Professor pulled out a menu and started pointing. “The Professor says he’ll have-a the scrumbled eggs and the bacon, extra crispy, and—”
Shade slapped the menu out of the pixie’s hands and glared at the two. “Well, I’m going right now. Alone, if I have to.”
The Professor shoved his hands in his coat pockets and pouted. Ginch threw his hands up in the air. “Fine! Fine! We come with you. Fatcha-coota-matchca, sproot!”
“Unfortunately, I believe I must remain here,” Poor Richard said with a sigh. “I fear my age would make me more of a hindrance than a help if action were in the offing. Besides, I must stay here and attempt to find a cure for poor Martinko.”
So they headed out, stopping only to let Johannes know they were off in search of another book guardian. Just as she was about to walk away, Shade turned back, took Martinko’s book list out of her pocket, and put it on the circulation desk. “Could you do me a favor? Could you and Caxton see who has checked out or even looked at these books in the past couple days and keep an eye on anyone new who takes an interest in them?”
Johannes read over the list. “This feels like skullduggery. And you know I am the great fan of skullduggery, mein friend. Ve vould be happy to do this! Vell, I vould be happy. Caxton—”
“Will bellyache about it, but he’ll do it. Make sure the place doesn’t burn to the ground while we’re gone.” And with that Shade and her friends strode through the door to Bilgewater.
•
They stepped out of the library tree on the edge of the seaside town, which was covered in a cold mist under a cloudy gray sky. Shade pulled her traveler’s coat closer to ward off the cold. Bilgewater loomed ahead. Shade gulped. Six months ago, she felt overwhelmed when she first went to the goblin market of Gypsum-upon-Swathmud, but this place was even more intimidating with its colossal, human-sized buildings and, no doubt, its gigantic human inhabitants. It’ll be okay, Shade reassured herself. Hardly any humans can see us.
“Ee, more o’ yez?” asked a human who suddenly appeared out of the mist behind them carrying a canvas bag and a rifle. Shade, Ginch, and the Professor all jumped. “Bloody fairies.”
“’Ey, whatta you do? You’re-a no supposed to see us,” Ginch said.
“Can’t help it, la. Made the mistake o’ loafin’ and lookin’ too mooch at a leaf o’ grass on St. Whitman’s day. Now mind—I’ve got me traps set doon by the stream and I’m right tired of yez lot turnin’ oop in ’em.”
“Maybe don’t set traps near where fairies live,” Shade said, eyeing his rifle warily.
“Maybe clear oot o’ Bilgewater,” the hunter grumbled in his thick accent, walking off. “Worse than bloody rats.”
“’Ey, you know where we find somebody inna the secret society?” Ginch called after him. Shade swatted him on the arm. “Whatta you do? It worked in Cottinghamborough . . . shiretown . . . Whatever it’s-a called, it worked there.”
“Maybe,” Shade conceded, “but that was a stupid little country town like the one I grew up in. Bilgewater’s a real, proper town—and one with humans. Any fairies running around here have got to be stealthy and cunning, which is what we’ve got to be as well. Got it?”
“Oh, we get it,” Ginch assured her. The Professor nodded emphatically, pulled his black eye patches out of his pocket, and covered up one of his eyes and one of Ginch’s. “See?” Ginch said. “We gotta the disguises, so we’re ready to go a-sneakin’ and a-snoopin’.”
Shade slapped away the Professor’s hands as he tried to fit an eye patch on her. When he tried to use it to cover up his other eye, Shade grabbed it. “Oh, no—we’re not doing that again. Now let’s go into town and see if we can find twins named Bowser.”
Ginch and the Professor’s eyes widened. They looked at each other and then at Shade. “Wait a minote! Bowser?”
“Yeah?”
“Regina and Ronnette Bowser?”
“Martinko didn’t say any first names—he just said ‘Bowser twins.’”
“So you tell us you look for the Bowser twins?”
“Yeah.”
Ginch and the Professor frowned, crossed their arms, and shook their heads. “We’re-a no lookin’ for the Bowser twins.”
Shade frowned and crossed her arms. “The donkle we aren’t!”
“The donkle we is!” Ginch fired back. “The Bowsers are-a the crooks!”
“You’re a couple of crooks!”
The Professor pointed to himself and Ginch and then held up his hand, his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. “Yeah, but we’re-a the teensy-and-the-weensy crooks,” Ginch explained. The Professor then stretched out his arms as wide as they could go. “Ginnie and Ronnie Bowser, they’re-a the big, big crooks! Gangsters! They run the criminal umpire.”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody. Now let’s go back to the library and—”
“No. I’m going to find the Bowser twins.”
“But it’s-a no safe! They—”
“If they’re keeping books safe, they can’t be that bad. Look, I�
��ve got to do this and I’m going to do this with or without you,” Shade said. And she meant it. Protecting those books and eventually bringing them back out into the world had been her father’s lifelong goal, and Shade was going to do it or . . . Well, Shade thought, I’m just going to do it. Best not to think of any other alternatives. And so she marched into town.
It didn’t take more than a minute for Shade to question the wisdom of that decision when a cart pulled by a huge draft horse almost ran her over. She leapt out of the way and was nearly trampled by a pack of filthy teenage boys in ragged clothing (they were very similar to your brother Norbert and his friends, except these boys were a bit grimier and actually spoke to one another and ran instead of shambling about zombie-like twiddling their little cellular telephones). Chasing them was a red-faced shopkeeper yelling about theft and making rude and questionable comments about the nature of their parentage.
Shade dashed out of the cobblestone street and flattened herself against the side of a building. From there, she watched the immense humans (well, immense to her, since she was about the size of your cat Major Tom if he were to stand on his hind legs, as opposed to your other cat, Mr. Wellington, who is still a kitten, although I do think he’s catching up to Major Tom these days) bustling to and fro, hauling baskets of fish and clothes, peddling flowers and fruits, staggering from jobs or pubs, and just generally running about being terribly loud, big, and terrifying. She took a few deep breaths to calm her nerves. As her pulse slowed, she realized that none of the humans tromping past actually seemed to notice that she was there. Granted, they weren’t supposed to, but Shade’s limited dealings with humanity had, improbably enough, been solely with exceptions to the rule. She sometimes felt as if she were a character in a poorly written series of comedic novels and all her interactions with the human race were written largely for laughs (which she is, but because I think it would be in very poor taste to tell her so, let’s just keep that between us, shall we?).
To test whether or not her impressions were correct, Shade took a tentative step forward and waved a hand at a toddler not much taller than her being led down the street by a kindly looking woman. “Hi, there, little . . . whatever you call a young human being. Hi.”
The child paid her no mind and continued to toddle down the street, sucking on four of her fingers and drooling down her chin in that appalling way that parents always view as cute and the rest of the world knows is absolutely revolting. Encouraged by this, Shade called up to a portly gentleman strolling by, “Fwoo! I can’t tell which smells worse—that stinking pipe or your feet!” Chuckling at his obliviousness, she turned to a sour-faced old woman hobbling along with a cane. “What’s the matter, Granny? Been sucking on a pickle?”
In a blur of motion, the old lady’s cane whipped over and clonked Shade on the head. “Ow! What the dangle?” Shade cried, clutching her head.
“Look, ya beut, just ’cause the rest o’ this lot’s too thick to see yez wee folk don’t mean I am,” the little old lady wheezed at Shade as people nearby looked at her like she was crazy.
Before Shade could reply, Ginch and the Professor dodged through the crowd to her side. “Whatta you do—runnin’ off like that?”
“Ee, more wee deadbeats,” the old lady grumbled.
“Say,” Ginch said, straightening his tie and his eye patch and giving the little old lady his most winning smile. “Mia bella nonna! You would no happen to know where we find the Bowser twins or the secret book guys or—”
Shade punched his arm. “Stop asking people that! It’s not going to—”
“Oh, I expect doon ’round the docks. That’s where all the worst fairy folk seem to be. Now clear oot and mind yez manners.”
Ginch blew her a kiss, which made the old lady scowl, although her cheeks did redden slightly. The three headed toward the waterfront, careful to avoid any humans. As they got closer, the air smelled more and more of fish and sea salt. Shade’s stomach tied itself in knots. She was both excited to come closer to realizing her father’s goal and afraid that she wouldn’t be able to or that something might happen to her and her friends along the way. And how exactly am I supposed to find twin gangsters and the headquarters of a secret criminal empire? she wondered.
“Hey, how’re we gonna to find the twin gangsters and the headquarters of the secret criminal umpire?” Ginch asked.
“I’ll figure it out,” Shade said. “We just need to look around the docks, ask a few questions—me, not you—and I’m sure we’ll track down the Bowsers.”
Ginch and the Professor twirled around and stopped, blocking her path. “So we look around, eh?”
“Yes.”
“You think-a you figure it all out?”
“Yes,” Shade said with more conviction than she felt.
Ginch and the Professor exchanged a doubtful look. The Professor reached into his coat and pulled out a pair of pants with a scroll sticking out of the back pocket labeled “Diploma.” He handed the pants to Shade, bowed, and gestured for her to walk past him.
“The Professor says if you the smarty pants, then lead-a the way. Where we go?”
“Um . . . ” Shade could feel her face getting hot. She hadn’t expected to be called out like this, and she didn’t like it, especially since she didn’t have an answer. After spending her childhood as a reader and knowing much more than the average Pleasant Hollow sprite—not that that is saying much—Shade had become rather vain about her intelligence and hated to admit when she came to the limits of it, and she was clearly at a limit.
“You no know, do you?” Ginch smirked.
Shade pointed her finger at him and opened her mouth to say something profoundly insulting when the cry of a seagull made her look past him. What she saw made her smile. “Yes. Yes, I do know where we go. We go there!”
In which we learn that legitimate
businesses do not need to note that they
are, in fact, legitimate businesses . . .
Sometimes in life when we don’t know where to go or what to do, we hope some power in the universe will send us a sign, like when your father was just out of school and wasn’t sure what to do with himself and happened to spot a pamphlet on eel farming, which was his first step on the path to owning and operating the sixth largest eel farm in the country. Or the time when your Uncle Vernon looked down from a departure screen telling him that his flight to Lagos had been delayed to see a lovely barista at the airport coffee shop looking over at him as she served a plum Danish to a customer, thus beginning his great love affair with plum Danishes.
Similarly, just as Shade was almost forced to admit that she didn’t know something, she spotted a very fortuitous sign. In this case it was an actual sign posted at fairy-height next to a fairy-sized door in the side of a run-down human tannery. The sign read:
Perfectly, Innocent, & Legal
Imports and Exports, Ltd.
A legitimate business and not at all
a front for a secret criminal empire.
“Whatta you mean we go there? That’s-a the legitimate business, not the secret criminal umpire,” Ginch said. The Professor nodded and pointed. “See—it says so on the sign.”
Shade’s brow furrowed. “What legitimate business would have to state that it’s a legitimate business and not secretly a bunch of gangsters?”
“Why, every time the Professor and I go into the business, we tell people that we’re legitimate. It’s whatta you do in the business world. Right, partner?”
The Professor nodded and pulled out a series of business cards declaring Ginch and the Professor to be “Legitimate and Not at All Fake or Crooked” pony traders, fireworks experts, clockmakers, home security consultants, wedding planners, royal surgeons, cake tasters, rat catchers, chimney sweeps, attorneys-at-law, and finally “Purveyors of Post-Theft Items.”
“But you two are fake and crooked when it comes to all of these . . . except that post-theft one.”
�
��Yeah, but we make the cards because that’s-a what the legitimate businesses do . . . We think.”
“Just shut up, blabberbrownie, and come on!” Shade grabbed each by the arm and hauled them over to the store.
Inside was a small, dimly lit space crammed with decorative masks and Persian rugs, strange figurines and odd weapons, silk robes and straw hats, multicolored vials and jars filled with pickled creatures, flutes and drums and all manner of string instruments, and no end of gewgaws, gimcracks, and whatchamacallits. Perched on a stool behind the counter was a wizened fairy with a long gray beard full of tangled knots. He absentmindedly twirled a lock of it, creating a new knot in the process, while writing in a logbook when the tinkle of the bell above the door made him look over. The movement of his beard suggested that he was smiling at them but they couldn’t tell because it completely covered his mouth. “Ah, customers! Delightful!” a muffled voice exclaimed from the depths of his facial hair.
As he hopped down and scurried over, Shade whispered, “Let me do the talking.”
Ginch gave the Professor’s arm a swat. “You heard the little Sprootshade. Dummy up and give somebody else the chance to talk!”
The Professor pretended to lock his mouth shut. As he mimed dropping a pretend key in his pocket, he did a double-take, then pulled out a lollipop, fuzzy with pocket-lint, which he popped into his mouth.
“So, messieurs and mademoiselle, what may I help you find this fine day?” the bearded fairy asked, clasping his tiny hands in front of his long beard.
“Are you one of the owners?” Shade asked.
“Oui. I am Monsieur Légal. I handle the day-to-day while my partners, Messieurs Perfectly and Innocent, scour all Elfame and her outer isles for the finest, most exotic, and most legitimate and legal imports.”
“Sounds like a fascinating yet completely legitimate and legal line of work,” Shade said.
“Oui! It is, it is.”
“And not at all a front for a secret criminal empire.”