by Greg Cox
Cassandra had no idea, that was for sure, but she was willing to bet that the Number of the Beast was involved somehow. The task before them was daunting, but she refused to let that discourage her. Jenkins and the others were counting on her, not to mention reality as they knew it.
“Well, we are looking for a book,” she said.
“So?” he asked.
“So we start with the library.”
Cole insisted he knew the way there, despite the house’s bewildering layout, but Cassandra soon realized that he might have been overstating matters slightly. The mansion was a maze that made the Library easy to navigate by comparison. Despite her best efforts, Cassandra soon lost track of what floor she was on. Dead ends and trick doors confounded them, forcing them to backtrack and try to figure out where they went astray. By the time they passed what she was pretty sure was the same stained-glass window for the sixth time, she was starting to lose faith in her helpful guide.
“I thought you knew your way around this madhouse?”
A disturbing possibility crossed her mind. What if he was deliberately misguiding her for ulterior motives? What if he wanted the book for himself, or was working in cahoots with somebody else? Just because somebody had sicced that rock-a-bye wind on him earlier didn’t mean that he couldn’t have his own agenda that he wasn’t sharing with her.
“Keep the faith, little lamb,” he said, looking a trifle abashed. “This house is a little more off the wall than I remembered, but we’re almost there.” They rounded a corner, which was not remotely built at the right angle, to find another dead end. Two wooden doors faced each other at the end of the corridor. Cole paused for a moment, glancing back and forth between the right and left doors, before nodding to himself and decisively picking the former. He strode forward and took hold of the knob.
“You want the library? Here’s the librar—”
He tugged open the door to reveal a three-story drop to a concrete patio below. A cool breeze invaded the hall from outdoors. Cole threw himself backward, away from the precipice, and slammed the door shut again.
“That didn’t look like the library,” Cassandra observed.
“My bad.” He approached the opposite door instead, somewhat more cautiously this time. “Now that I think of it.…”
The second time was the charm. The door opened onto a private library that suffered in comparison to the Library, but looked impressive enough in its own right. Cassandra counted six walls boasting six bookcases of six shelves each; she held off on counting how many books were on each shelf, but guessed that those numbers were probably divisible by six as well. The mere thought made her start to feel a little loopy again, but she gritted her teeth and soldiered on.
“What now?” Cole asked.
“Start scanning the shelves for anything Goose-related.” Cassandra doubted that the missing pages themselves would be readily on display, but who knew? Perhaps they were hidden in plain sight, like Poe’s Purloined Letter. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
They started at opposite ends of the library, working toward each other. Cassandra swept her flashlight beam over the spines of the books, crooking her head to read their titles. No surprise, Wilshire had an extensive collection of occult volumes, on topics ranging from astral projection to necromancy, none of which had apparently saved him in the end. Just reading the titles of some of the books made her skin crawl, while others looked slimy to the touch. A musty smell, laced with something unnamable, turned her stomach.
Just what was Mysteries of the Worm about anyway?
She suspected that Jenkins would not approve of Ezra Wilshire’s collection, and might even want to confiscate a few of the volumes at some point down the road, but that was a matter for another day. She kept on scouring the shelves by the light of her beam, while wishing that Wilshire had been into Beatrix Potter or dirty limericks instead. “Would it have killed him to have read Little Women once in a while?”
“What’s that?” Cole asked from across the room.
“Nothing,” she answered. “Just making an observation.”
“Okay then. I thought that maybe you had … hey, look at this!”
The excitement in his voice set her pulse racing. Abandoning her own search, she darted across the library to join him.
“What is it? Did you find something?”
“Maybe. Scope this out.”
The beam from his phone illuminated a hardcover book resting on a shelf in front of him. Cassandra peered at the title on the spine:
The Compleat Mother Goose.
“Yes! Now we’re getting somewhere.” She threw up her hand, uncertain whether a high five or a fist bump was considered cool these day, and somehow managed to make a fumbling attempt at both. “Good peepers, Bo-Peeps!”
“You know it. Told you I had this covered.”
Cassandra pulled the book down from the shelf. A quick glance at the copyright page indicated that this particular volume had been printed in 1916, which meant that this wasn’t the Mother Goose book they were looking for, unless maybe the missing pages had been slyly bound into it at some point? She started to flip through it, then noticed that one page, about midway through the book, was jutting out slightly as though it had come loose or perhaps been bound incorrectly, so that it almost resembled a bookmark.
“What is it?” Cole asked, noting her interest.
“This page, it’s … crooked.” She opened the book to the “marked” section, where she found two illustrated nursery rhymes sitting beside each other. On the left-hand, or verso, page was that same rhyme about the crooked man, while the right-hand (recto) page—which was the one that was actually set in crookedly—displayed another familiar rhyme:
Hickory, dickory, dock,
The mouse ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
The mouse did run,
Hickory, dickory, dock.
Cassandra placed the book down on a desk, the better to examine it. Cole peered over her shoulder, shining his own beam on the pages. Cassandra pulled the cord on an old banker’s lamp which, to her surprise, lit up to give them a better view of the book.
“The crooked man again,” Cassandra noted, indicating the page on the left. “That can’t be an accident.”
“You think that page was messed up on purpose … as a clue?”
“I’m sure of it.” She felt like she was following a trail of bread crumbs, although that was more of a fairy-tale thing. “Now we just need to figure out what we’re supposed to be seeing here.”
“What about the other rhyme?” Cole asked. “That’s the one that’s out of whack, like the crooked man is pointing at it.”
“Good point.” She compared the two rhymes to each other, reading from left to right. “Well, both rhymes mention a mouse. ‘Caught a crooked mouse,’ ‘the mouse ran up the clock,’ etcetera. Maybe that means something?”
A horrifying thought struck her. “Please tell me we’re not looking for a mouse hole in this rat trap. We could be here all night!”
“More like all week,” Cole said. “We’re talking rooms on rooms, remember?”
Cassandra looked for some way to narrow the search. “What about your great-grandfather?” she asked. “He’s presumably the one who hid the pages in the first place. Was there any one particular room or section of the house he worked on?”
Cole scoffed at the idea. “Where didn’t he work? Old Man Wilshire was constantly remodeling things. Soon as a room was finished, he’d tear it down to build it back up again, different from before. There’s not an inch of this house that wasn’t redone a couple of times at least—except for the Hell Room, of course.”
“The what?” Cassandra asked.
“Forgot to tell you about that part. Story is, Old Man Wilshire had a secret room up in the clock tower where he met with the Devil every night to discuss business.”
“I thought he was hiding from the Devil?”
“Hey, I’m just passing along what
people say. Maybe the Hell Room was a safe space for some reason, where he and the Devil could meet to haggle over the terms of their deal, or exchange stock tips, or play poker, or some crazy shit like that. Nobody knows for sure, since Old Man Wilshere kept that secret to himself, but that’s where he died finally, right up there in the clock tower.”
“Clock tower!” Cassandra pointed at the rhyme on the crooked page. “That’s it. ‘The mouse ran up the clock.’ The crooked man leads us to the mouse which leads us to the only room in the house that your great-grandfather could count on not to be altered.” Holding on to the book just in case, she hurried back toward the hall. “Quick! Which way to this Hell Room?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Huh?” Cassandra slowed down. “What are you saying?”
“Supposedly there’s a secret stairway hidden somewhere in the house, but if my family ever knew where it was, they never told me.” He caught up with her. “Probably didn’t want me poking around in any Hell Room … for obvious reasons.”
Cassandra sighed. “Then I guess I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”
“How’s that?” he asked.
“By working my brain, Librarian-style.”
Using her phone to search the Internet, she called up several exterior views of the house, including some handy bird’s-eye views that gave her a good look at the layout of the roof around the clock tower. She committed them to memory before putting away the phone and throwing out her hands to summon up a hallucinatory model of the house, which shimmered before her eyes in three dimensions. Ethereal music played in her ears, orchestrated by the brain grape that was bound to kill her one of these days if her risky job didn’t do the trick first. Moving her hands as though conducting an orchestra, she rotated the model before her, examining it from every angle.
“Er, what are you doing, little lamb?”
“Trying to solve this Puzzle House, and you can call me Cassandra, by the way. I haven’t been a lost little lamb for a long time now.” Determination steeled her voice. “Now be quiet and let me concentrate.”
“But—”
“Sssh!” she said, sounding like a proper Librarian in more ways than one. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
Cole got the message and piped down, even as she talked herself through the problem at hand.
“Despite all the tricks and decoys and distractions, the physical geometry of the house is still a matter of volume, area, and height. Taking into account these practical realities, there are only so many places where that hidden stairwell can be located … unless Old Man Wilshire found a way to warp space itself somehow.” She made a face. “I really hate that.”
But she’d cross that non-Euclidian bridge if and when she came to it. For the present, she chose to work on the assumption that conventional math and physics applied, because the alternative was just too discouraging to contemplate.
“We just need to map the interior layout of the house onto its outer shell to determine where the hidden spaces are,” she said. “Of course, this would be simpler if the house itself made any sense whatsoever.…”
Part of her brain had been charting the house during their uncertain explorations. Turning her gaze to one side, she attempted to construct a 3-D map of the mansion floor by floor, despite all the confusing irregularities and misleading window dressing. The illusory floor plans were incomplete or fuzzy in places, but they slowly began to come together in a coherent fashion, more or less.
“Right. Those back stairs connect with the sliding doors hiding that one freaky corridor which doubles back through the upside-down fireplace, crisscrossing itself, to bring you right back where you started.…”
Her outstretched hands manipulated the images glowing before her eyes, allowing her to shift walls and doorways and windows about as needed. Her gestures were hesitant at first, but grew bolder and swifter as the puzzle gradually revealed itself to her. Virtual blueprints smelled like paste and lemon-scented glass cleaner.
“And this landing goes there … no, here!That’s it.”
She wondered whether Stone would be better equipped to handle this challenge than she was, or would he be even more confounded by the house’s architectural insanity, which didn’t conform to any logical design or principles? Which of them would find it the most frustrating, she or Stone?
Doesn’t matter, she decided. He’s not here. I am.
Once she had the house’s interior mapped out to the best of her abilities, she shifted it to the left, superimposing it onto her immaterial model of the exterior walls and roof, while looking for a concealed route to the upper reaches of the clock tower. The answer to the puzzle practically leaped out at her, chiming red and flashing like cymbals.
“There it is!” She pointed eagerly at a diagram Cole couldn’t see. “That negative space. That’s where the hidden stairwell has to be!”
He stared at her incredulously. “What are you tripping on, lady? Or are you working some kind of spooky librarian magic here?”
“Not magic, math!” She grabbed hold of his hand. “I know exactly where to go now. Follow me!”
Her mental map floated before her eyes like the HUD in one of Ezekiel’s video games, keeping pace with her as she used it to navigate the mansion’s relentless mysteries with increasing speed and confidence. As she raced through the house, and up and down its winding staircases, she deftly erased its assorted lures and deceptions from the model to create a clearer picture of the way ahead. False doors and detours popped like soap bubbles as she deleted them from view, while dragging Cole along for the ride.
“Hey, I thought I was conducting this tour?” he said. “You sure you know where you’re going?”
“I can see it all now, bright as day! Just stick with me and try to keep up!”
Two floors, three rooms, eight halls, and a cunningly concealed walk-through closet later, Cassandra came to a halt in front of a short flight of irregular wooden steps jutting out into the hall, which climbed straight into a wall, ending right below a large stained-glass portrait of a cat, distorted in the mode of a Cubist painting. No light passed through the colored glass.
“This is it!” Cassandra collapsed her shimmering model with a wave of her hand. She squeezed Cole’s hand in excitement while pointing eagerly at steps leading up to the art. “The crooked stile … and the crooked cat … rendered in a crooked style!”
“I guess,” Cole said, trying to keep up. “So where’s the crooked mouse?”
“Let’s find out.” She remembered the stained-glass window hiding the entrance to the basement. “See if this opens up somehow.”
Cole found a latch with little difficulty. He pulled open the window to expose a spiral staircase exactly where Cassandra had calculated it had to be. The stairwell led upward toward the clock tower.
“Damn, girl,” Cole said, impressed. “Your math is magic.”
“I like to think so,” she said, grinning. Take that, Puzzle House.
She couldn’t help counting the steps as they climbed the hidden staircase. Six, twelve, eighteen … ultimately, thirty-six steps brought them to a door at the top of the stairs, which boasted a stained-glass depiction of a crooked mouse, matching the cat at the bottom of the stairs.
Thirty-six, Cassandra thought. Six by six …
14
Oregon
The Large Animals Room was a zoo, in more ways than one. Pens, enclosures, pools, and tanks held a variety of exotic beasts from myth and legend, including myriad leviathans, chimeras, shape-shifters, and hybrids, all of whom appeared to be in an uproar as Jenkins arrived at the menagerie after traversing the Library with unseemly haste. Ordinarily, the animals resided as peacefully as on the Ark, but the goose’s erratic antics had clearly stirred them up, as evidenced by the golden egg resting on the floor in front of Nessie’s tank. A chorus of roars, howls, barks, wails, trills, chirps, hisses, lows, whinnies, and miscellaneous caterwauling assailed his eardrums and his pa
tience. He hadn’t heard such a hubbub since that time the banshee clans had challenged the Sirens to a sing off. It was going to take a considerable quantity of bones, biscuits, sugar cubes, and chew toys to calm this troublesome brouhaha, not to mention precious time that he could ill afford to spare at the present moment. Not for the first time, he wished that the Library’s budget allowed for a full-time zookeeper.
But if wishes were horses, he thought, I’d probably be tending them, too.
“Hush! HUSH!” he called out in his most stentorian tone. “Everyone settle down. Nothing to see here.” He placed the offending egg in an empty nest while making his way toward the well-stocked feed cabinet. “Everyone be patient and we’ll get this all sorted out in no time. Just wait your turn.”
A Questing Beast yipped vociferously.
“I said, patience … and that means you, Glatisant.”
The Beast sulked petulantly in its stall. Its elongated neck retracted.
“That’s better.” Jenkins was wondering where just to begin when he noticed belatedly that two of the pens were missing their occupants. The King of Beasts no longer presided over his regal den, while the Unicorn had vacated his stall, leaving a feed bucket full of oats and honey. Neither animal had been caged, as this had never been necessary before, so Jenkins was at a loss to explain them wandering off—until he remembered another nursery rhyme:
The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown …
“Oh dear.” He chided himself for not anticipating this; as with the errant goose, the Lion and the Unicorn had clearly been affected by the breaking of the Mother Goose Treaty, which meant that they had almost surely bolted from the Large Animals Room in pursuit of a crown.
No, he corrected himself, not merely a crown. The Crown.
There were many priceless examples of royal headgear in the Library’s custody, from the helm of Hades to Anastasia Romanov’s cursed tiara, but for Jenkins, a one-time Knight of the Round Table, only one crown was truly the Crown: