The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase

by Greg Cox

  PROPERTY OF FLYNN CARSEN. HANDS OFF.

  Baird sighed. Still working on that “team player” thing.…

  The label cinched it, though. Flynn had been here and now he was missing.

  She decided that she had seen enough. It was time to head back to the Library and let the rest of the team know what she’d discovered. With any luck, maybe one of the other Librarians had already crossed paths with Flynn while investigating the other incidents. Taking custody of the forgotten scanner, she started back toward the Old Woman’s giant shoe and took her phone back out to dial Jenkins so he could reopen a doorway back to the Annex.

  “You get on your way, young lady!” a stern voice accosted her. “Can’t you read the signs? No trespassing!”

  Baird spun around to see someone who could only be Mother Goose herself standing atop an oversized fiberglass pumpkin that had once housed a well-known pumpkin eater and his wayward wife. The indignant crone looked as though she had just stepped out of the pages of a storybook. A conical black hat, held on a by ribbon, gave her a distinctly witchy appearance. Tight gray braids peeked out from beneath the brim of the hat, while a pair of antique spectacles rested upon her sharp, pointed nose. She wore a green peasant dress with a ruffled collar and sleeves above a pair of striped stockings and buckled black shoes. A red woolen shawl was draped over her bony shoulders. Her wizened face was craggy, her expression severe.

  Startled by the figure’s sudden appearance, Baird nonetheless kept her cool. She’d encountered stranger beings since signing on with the Library.

  “Mother Goose, I presume?”

  Or at least a Mother Goose, she thought.

  “The one and only,” the crone insisted. A pronounced Boston accent bordered on parody. “No mere pretender am I.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” Baird said diplomatically. She cautiously approached the older woman, while wondering precisely who or what she was facing. A Fictional like Moriarty, freshly sprung from the actual pages of a book, or one of Elizabeth Goose’s descendants, claiming the ancestral title and identity of Mother Goose? Baird couldn’t rule out either possibility.

  “That’s close enough,” the woman atop the pumpkin said. She shook a crooked wooden cane at Baird. “Keep your distance, Guardian. This is no affair of yours, my fine beauty!”

  Baird was caught off guard by being addressed by her title. She paused in her tracks. “You know who I am?”

  “Aye, Colonel Eve Baird, and I know your ways. You’ll not file me away in your Library, no matter how grand it may be. I have important matters to attend to and I’ll brook no interference. You’d be well-advised not to meddle in my business.”

  Sorry, Baird thought. Meddling is a big part of my job description.

  “Can’t we just talk?” Baird raised her hands to indicate that she was unarmed. “I only want to ask you some questions.”

  Mother Goose snorted at the idea.

  “I keep my own counsel and do not answer to the likes of you.” She pointed with her cane. “Be on your way, Guardian, and trespass in my Garden no more.”

  “Forget it,” Baird said, losing her patience. She could play Bad Cop too if she had to. “I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers.” She strode toward the immense pumpkin, prepared to scale its faded orange walls as readily as she would a concrete barricade in a war zone. “Where is Flynn Carsen? What’s become of him?”

  Mother Goose smirked, as though at a private joke. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I would, actually, now that you mention it.” An automatic pistol was tucked beneath Baird’s jacket, but she held off on drawing it just yet; pulling a gun on Mother Goose just felt wrong somehow. “Are you going to get down from there or I do have to climb up and get you?”

  Baird reminded herself not get overconfident. Under ordinary circumstances, she could take a gray-haired old lady, no problem, but these circumstances were about as far from ordinary as a cow jumping over the moon. And when it came to magic, appearances could be very deceiving.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, dearie,” Mother Goose advised, not seeming at all concerned about the increasingly impatient Guardian. “I won’t be staying long.”

  Before Baird could ask her what she meant, the crone cupped one hand in front of her mouth, miming a megaphone, and honked as loud as her feathered namesake. Baird fought an urge to clap her own hands over her ears.

  “Not exactly what I wanted to hear!” she shouted back.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Guardian.”

  An answering honk came from somewhere overhead. Looking up, Baird gaped at the sight of a gigantic goose—or gander—swooping down from the murky gray sky. The bird’s wingspan was at least twelve feet across, making it only slightly smaller than that Native American thunderbird she and Flynn had just barely escaped in the Cascade Mountains last summer. Its snowy white plumage contrasted with its large orange beak—and the long red ribbon dangling from said beak. The wind from the goose’s great wings stirred the tree branches as well as the fallen leaves carpeting the ground. Its honk put an air horn to shame.

  “Okay, I didn’t see that coming.” Baird shook her head in disbelief. “I probably should have, considering, but…”

  Mother Goose cackled in glee.

  “Forgotten your nursery rhymes have you, Colonel?” The huge bird alit atop the phony pumpkin, landing next to Mother Goose, who climbed onto its back as though it was a pony and not the biggest goose ever. Her raspy voice took on a singsong quality as she recited: “Old Mother Goose, when she wanted to wander, would ride through the air on a very fine gander!”

  Gander, not goose, then, Baird noted, although the bird’s gender was not particularly pertinent at the moment. No way was she going to let Mother Goose fly out of here, not while Flynn was missing and unaccounted for.

  “Don’t even think about it.” Baird drew her gun and took aim at the other woman. “Stay right where you are—and that goes for the bird, too.”

  “Really, Guardian?” Mother Goose clucked at her. “You’re going to open fire on a harmless old lady who hasn’t done you any harm … yet?”

  “Harmless my foot,” Baird replied, while balking at the idea of actually pulling the trigger. Despite Jenkins’s warnings about the danger posed by a rogue Mother Goose, and the mystery surrounding Flynn’s disappearance, she knew the old woman had her number. She couldn’t bring herself to shoot Mother Goose purely on suspicion of … what? Trespassing in a condemned theme park? Impersonating a storybook character? Illegal possession and abuse of nursery rhymes? Having a giant goose—that is, gander—on call?

  Damn it, she thought. “Don’t test me, Goose … or whoever you are.”

  “I don’t need to test you, Eve Baird. I know you too well. You’re a soldier girl, not a murderer.”

  Calling Baird’s bluff, Mother Goose took both ends of the red ribbon in her hands and pulled on them as though they were reins. Extending its wings, the gargantuan gander took to the skies. Baird realized that she could try to wing the bird at least, but she hesitated too long. She couldn’t risk shooting the gander without causing the old woman to fall from too high up.

  “Come back here!” Baird hollered. “What have you done with Flynn?”

  “Go back to your Library, Eve Baird, and leave me and mine alone!”

  Baird watched in frustration as Goose and gander ascended into the clouds, taking any answers with them. Lacking a flying carpet or air support, there was no way to go after them for now. Baird found herself alone in the deserted park, hoping that Jenkins could shed some light on what had just transpired.

  ’Cause, frankly, she was stumped.

  6

  Oregon

  “Humpty Dumpty?” Jenkins said gravely. “Oh dear.”

  Returning to the Annex via the Magic Door, Baird had briefed Jenkins on what she had discovered—and encountered—at Mother Goose’s Magic Garden. To her surprise, he appeared even more concerned about the wrecked Humpty m
annequin than Mother Goose’s actual appearance and escape.

  “Is that bad?” she asked.

  “More than you can possibly imagine, Colonel.” Jenkins extracted a massive leather-bound tome from a bookshelf and laid it down on the conference table in front of Baird. It appeared to be a general guide to the mythologies of the world as opposed to a collection of nursery rhymes. “‘Humpty Dumpty’ is actually one of the oldest and most powerful rhymes in the book … and there’s a very good reason why Humpty Dumpty must never be put together again.”

  Baird braced herself for the worst. “Hit me.”

  “Humpty Dumpty, or ‘Humelken-Pumpelken’ as he’s known in Germany, or ‘Thille Lille’ in Sweden, or many other names in many other lands, is more than just a childish storybook character. He is a symbolic representation of the original World Egg, from which all of Creation was hatched according to numerous ancient myths and Gnostic traditions.” He opened the book and turned the pages until he reached a woodcut illustration of a cosmic egg cracking open to disgorge stars, planets, and swirling nebulae. Leafing through the book revealed similar imagery on pottery shards, temple mosaics, mystic scrolls, and alchemical texts. He paused on a photo of weathered stone hieroglyphics. A pictographic nest cradled a stylized, two-dimensional egg inscribed with mystical runes. “Interestingly enough, in the ancient Egyptian version of the myth, the Egg is said to have been laid by a divine Goose.…”

  “Where did the goose come from?” Baird asked.

  “That’s another story,” he said, a trifle evasively. “The relevant point is that restoring the Egg—in other words, putting Humpty Dumpty back together again—would essentially reverse the Big Bang … and might eventually lead to the birth of a brand-new universe, overwriting the one we know.”

  He closed the book for emphasis. Loudly.

  “But the Humpty at the park is just a broken fiberglass mannequin,” she protested, before remembering the excess magical energy it was apparently charged with, according to the detector. “Isn’t it?”

  “At one time, probably, but magic is all about symbolism. You should know that by now,” he chided her. “Power, focus, effect. Let us assume that Mother Goose is providing the power, Humpty Dumpty is the focus, and the effect.… Well, fourteen billion years isn’t a bad run for a universe, but I wasn’t expecting a reboot quite so soon.”

  Baird tried to grasp the enormity of what Jenkins was implying. The fate of the world was one thing—she was getting used to that—but the entire universe? Because Mother Goose might want to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

  That was bizarre even by Library standards, which was saying something.

  She held on to her sanity by getting down to brass tacks. “But that hasn’t happened yet? We can still stop it?”

  “I sincerely hope so,” Jenkins said. “The fact that the universe does not, as yet, appear to be collapsing in on itself suggests that the individual you encountered, who claims to be Mother Goose, has yet to fully realize her aims. My current working theory—or best guess, if you prefer—is that she may need to reassemble the entire spell book to perform magic of such magnitude. Furthermore, legend holds that the original text contains lost verses of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ that may indeed hold the power to unmake reality on a cosmic scale.”

  “In other words,” Baird translated, “we need to find those three fragments of the original book before Mother Goose does.”

  “If she has not already obtained one or more of them,” Jenkins added, always the pessimist. “That ill-advised publication was divided in three for good reason, Colonel. Reassembling the book is a bad idea in general, even without a rogue Mother Goose on the loose.”

  He winced at the accidental rhyme.

  “Understood,” Baird said. “But why is this happening now, after all these years?”

  “If I may venture a guess, the recent outbreak of wild magic, which has roused many previously dormant magical artifacts and spells, unleashing them anew upon the world, might well be the catalyst here.”

  Baird nodded. “Like when Prospero got his wizardly mojo back, after being powerless for centuries.”

  “Precisely,” Jenkins said. “And one more thing, Colonel. Magic, once awakened, often wants to express itself, so the magic of Mother Goose, long hidden away and suppressed, may itself be at work here. The fractured spell book may long to be complete again … and is striving to accomplish that end via the individual you encountered at the park.”

  “Yeah, what about her?” Baird asked. “Where does she fit in to this theory? Is she a pawn, an instigator, or what? She can’t actually be the Elizabeth Goose, can she?”

  “Not a chance,” Jenkins said. “That particular Mother Goose was a respectable Boston matriarch, not the cackling caricature you described. We’re dealing with someone who has adopted the persona of Mother Goose for their own highly imprudent purposes.”

  “And we have no idea who that person might be?”

  “Not as yet, Colonel.”

  Great, Baird thought.

  “Any word from the others yet? Or Flynn?”

  “I’m afraid not, Colonel. You were the first to return from your investigation. And Mr. Carsen remains unaccounted for, aside from your discovery at the park.”

  Flynn’s discarded magic detector rested on Baird’s desk, reminding her that he was still MIA. Had Mother Goose done something to him, or had he ingeniously escaped her clutches somehow? Flynn was a survivor, despite his many eccentricities. Baird refused to assume the worst until she knew for certain what had become of him.

  Baird hoped her Librarians were faring better than she had. She wondered what they were up to now.

  And what had become of Flynn?

  7

  Ohio

  “Sorry. My wife’s not here,” the farmer said. “She’s at work.”

  This was not what Ezekiel Jones wanted to hear. It was unfair enough that he, an international man of mystery and master thief, had gotten stuck taking the Magic Door to some bucolic backwater in the middle of nowhere, but now the person he was looking for wasn’t even home? If he didn’t know better, he’d think that the Clippings Book had it in for him.

  Mary Simon was the Goose descendant who had allegedly run into some hostile blind mice. Ezekiel had hoped to do some digging on that incident and get back to the Library in no time at all. Standing on the front porch of a predictably picturesque Ohio farmhouse, whose address he had gleaned from the Internet, he found himself tragically out of his element. Chickens clucked and pecked in a coop nearby. Barnyard smells wafted on the breeze. A silo was the closest thing to a skyscraper. A dozy hound dog was stretched out on the porch, drooling. There probably wasn’t anything worth stealing in the entire county.

  “And where is work?” he asked.

  “The library, of course.”

  “Library?” Ezekiel wasn’t sure he’d heard that right.

  “Naturally. She’s the children’s librarian, isn’t she?”

  Of course she is, he thought, amused. Fate definitely seemed to be messing with him today. “That wasn’t in the news clipping.”

  Farmer Simon stood in the doorway, looking Ezekiel over. “Who did you say you were with again?”

  “Animal Control,” he lied easily. “Looking into reports of a recent mutant rodent sighting.”

  “Don’t know anything about that myself,” the farmer admitted. “I was away at the Grange when that happened.” He continued to regard Ezekiel quizzically. “You’re not with the local outfit, I’m guessing. There’s more than a trace of Down Under in your accent if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You got me, mate.” Ezekiel lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper while making a show of glancing around to make sure no one else was listening, even though they seemed to have the farm to themselves, aside from the poultry and livestock, and only the dog was close enough to eavesdrop on the conversation. “Between you and me, and this is strictly off the record, we may have a global infes
tation on our hands. But keep that under your hat, okay? We wouldn’t want to start a panic.”

  “I imagine not,” the farmer said. “But just how serious a problem are we talking about here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Hard to say,” Ezekiel said with a shrug. “It’s probably nothing, but it needs to be checked out. Better safe than sorry.”

  “That’s for certain.” The farmer stepped away from the front door. “Mary won’t be home for a couple of hours, but you’re welcome to wait inside.”

  “Thanks for the offer, mate, but I’m on a tight schedule. Where exactly would I find this library?”

  “Smack dab in the middle of town, just off Main Street.” The farmer peered at the long dirt driveway leading to a lonely country road several yards away. Cornfields stretched for acres in the distance. “Say, how did you get here anyway? Where’s your car?”

  Ezekiel had stepped onto the farm through the doorway of a nearby toolshed, but he could hardly explain how the Magic Door worked to a civilian. Thinking on his feet, he ad-libbed instead.

  “Oh, my partner dropped me off while following up on another lead.” He took out his phone. “I’ll just call and tell her to come pick me up.”

  With any luck, Ezekiel thought, Jenkins can fine-tune the settings on the Magic Door to transport me straight from the Library to, er, the library.

  “No need for that,” the farmer said. “As it happens, I need to drive into town to pick up some fresh fertilizer at the feed-and-grain store. I can drop you off at the library on the way.”

  Ezekiel figured the Magic Door would be faster and less trouble. “That’s nice of you to offer, but—”

  “No bother,” the farmer insisted, not taking no for answer. “You stay right here while I get the keys to the pickup.” The hound lifted her head. “Say, you don’t mind riding up front with the dog, do you? Bernice does love her car rides.”

  *   *   *

  One slobbery, bumpy ride later, the truck rolled into Banbury, Ohio, a small rural town whose downtown area seemed to mostly consist of a single wide thoroughfare and a few side streets. A canvas banner hanging over the street advertised a country fair. The pickup pulled up to the curb in front of a tidy, one-story building just one block off the main drag. A sign out front identified it as the public library. An outdoor book drop sat by the front entrance, along with a couple of loitering teenagers.