Not many people today are familiar with brownies, indisputedly the friendliest species of fairy. Tiny, wingless creatures, brownies wear hats made from nutshells and dapper little three-piece suits and have a gentle sort of magic mostly used for practical jokes.
Usually found in places where large operations are going on, like factories and, of course, hotels, brownies always like to run things—whether they’ve been invited to help or not. They adhere to strict routines, which makes them excellent workers. But be warned: nothing makes a brownie behave more badly than a disrupted routine.
In the old days, brownies lived in trees and when they died, their spirits became one with those trees. Generations of brownies had lived in the Algonquin oak tree before it got chopped up and made into the hotel itself. Since then, the descendants of the original Algonquin brownies had adopted the hotel as their home, and as you probably guessed, those brownies—not the old waiters or Mr. Kneebone—were the ones running the establishment so well.
In fact, the brownies took great pride in their hoteling skills.
They preferred to remain invisible and anonymous to avoid interference, but Olive had been born with fairy sight. But even though she could see them, she couldn’t understand their language, which sounded like the peeps of newborn chicks. Maybe Mathilde could understand them. We’ll never know for sure. Yet over the years, Olive had become the brownies’ friend, and she worked hard to keep them happy.
Because when the Algonquin brownies weren’t happy, things went quite wrong around the hotel.
Take, for example, that time the florist brought tiger lilies to decorate the lobby instead of the usual forget-me-nots.
Brownies love forget-me-nots.
They hate tiger lilies.
Later that morning, fat Mr. Arbuckle, permanent tenant of room 42, came downstairs for his breakfast.
“Six eggs over easy, four pieces of white toast with butter and marmalade, ten pieces of well-done bacon, and coffee with cream and sugar,” he called as he lumbered across the dining room and lowered himself into his usual chair at his usual table.
Bang!
Splat!
Mr. Arbuckle’s chair buckled beneath him and he crashed to the floor.
The waiters discovered shortly thereafter that the fourth leg of every chair in the room had been sawed in half.
Suddenly every tiger-lily-filled vase in the lobby crashed to the floor, sending shards and petals and water flying across the marble. When Olive saw a troop of brownies heading for the china cabinet, she ran up 44th Street to the flower shop.
“Come right away,” she shouted at the florist. “Everyone at the Algonquin is horribly allergic to the tiger lilies. Bring forget-me-nots as fast as you can.”
The tiger lilies were snatched off the floor and thrown out into the street; the forget-me-nots were stuffed into mop buckets and empty soup cans until new vases could be bought. The waiters took a badly needed tea break in the Rose Bar.
When the waiters came back out, each of the sawed-up dining room chairs somehow had four perfectly fit legs again.
Everyone but Mr. Arbuckle marveled at the miracle.
“Madness!” he shouted, rubbing an ice pack on his rather bruised bottom. “I demand that you find the culprit! Who is responsible?”
Mr. Kneebone resumed his post behind the concierge desk.
“Who can say for sure,” he yawned, exhausted from the day’s ordeal. “These things just happen, that’s all.”
And he sank into a grateful late-morning slumber.
Please don’t get the wrong idea about the Algonquin brownies.
For the most part, they really are very sweet creatures. They just happen to be particular.
You might think that Olive had a very hard job to do, keeping the brownies happy. But understand this: the brownies looked after Olive as well.
They chanted sweet little spells while she slept to make her grow up pretty; they mixed special chestnut honey into her morning tea that made her hair thick as rope.
Each year on her birthday, they turned a fruit crate into a puppy for an hour or so, until the barking started to draw attention. When Olive cried, the brownies turned her tears into rosewater drops and bottled them in pretty perfume jars and hid the jars away for later, because everyone knows that rosewater tears dabbed on the face of an old woman will make her young again.
The brownies loved Olive as much as they loved orderliness and industry, and she loved them too.
So, now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s return to our story, which is about to take an interesting turn.
Progress is a hungry thing, and eventually it hunts down even the most resistant holdouts.
In this case, it arrived at the Algonquin in the form of Mr. Rex Runcible.
This Mr. Runcible stomped in through the glass-and-oak front doors and planted himself in the middle of the lobby, hands on his hips, mustache twitching, nose crinkled as though he smelled stinky cheese. He glared down at Mr. Kneebone, who slept in a happy little puddle of drool on the front desk.
“Wake up, you old billy goat,” ordered Mr. Runcible, swatting Mr. Kneebone with his hat.
Mr. Kneebone snorted and woke up with a start. “Can I help you, sir?” he asked drowsily.
“Who’s the manager here?” demanded Mr. Runcible.
“I am,” replied Mr. Kneebone.
“You mean, you were,” snapped Mr. Runcible. “You’re fired. Good night and good luck to you.”
A staff meeting was called. All of the hotel workers crammed into the lobby. All two hundred brownies were in attendance as well, standing on the moldings near the ceiling. Olive sat behind the potted palm next to Mathilde’s suite and patted the orange cat nervously.
Mr. Runcible stood on a chair.
“I just bought the Algonquin from the old owner,” he shouted. “And I intend to drag this dump out of the dark ages and into the modern world—starting now. All of you had better shape up or ship out. Big changes are coming.”
The second his little speech was over, the glass-and-oak front doors swung open and in marched a small army of construction workers. They tore the front doors off the hinges and stuck power drills into the floor, sending chunks of marble flying everywhere. Then they piled up the lobby’s furniture and hacked it up with axes.
And in the meantime, something else began to happen, something quiet and strange, something that no one noticed amidst the noise and chaos.
The hands of the old grandfather clock started to move faster.
As the workers tore the paintings from the walls and threw them on the floor, the clock’s hands moved faster still. And when the workers pried up the oak wall panels with crowbars, the clock hands had almost caught up with the hands of the clocks in the world outside.
Olive looked up. All two hundred brownies stood like statues on the ceiling molding, paralyzed by the sight of the horrific destruction below. Several workers below hauled a vat of cement into the lobby and set it down in front of Mathilde’s suite. Those workers laughed at the golden-lettered sign and pulled out Mathilde’s precious little bed; one of them stepped on it, splintering it to pieces. Cement was mixed; Spackle knives were poised.
I’m sure you can guess what happened next.
Within minutes, Mathilde’s suite was gone.
You would think that it would be hard to hear anything in that room over the drills and the ripping sounds and noise coming in from the street. But as the workers cemented up the cat’s cubby, a shrill chant rose above the din.
And for the first time in her life, Olive understood the brownies’ language. They said one word, over and over again:
“It will be business as usual around here,” Mr. Runcible told the startled hotel customers, his face stretched into an unnatural-looking rubbery grin.
But no one believed him, and they were right not to.
When the workers left at sunset, a tense quiet settled over the shredded lobby. Olive sat in the corner, trying to gl
ue Mathilde’s bed back together while the cat watched with great concern.
By this time, the grandfather clock was ticking away so rapidly that it swayed, and it shook with noisy chimes as each hour passed.
And then, at midnight, on the twelfth stroke, the clock made a terrible noise, as though choking on nuts and bolts.
The face of the clock flew open and tiny springs shot out everywhere.
Rat-tat-tat-tat! Ping-ping-ping! Zzzzzing!
Olive heard gleeful cheers and shrieks: a team of brownies was climbing triumphantly down the side of the clock.
The war for the Algonquin had begun.
House phones began to ring in the lobby. Mr. Runcible answered them, juggling three or four receivers at a time.
“Yes? There’s a what in room 33? A hog? That’s impossible. All right, I’ll send someone up right away.”
And then:
“Hello? What? It’s snowing in your room? You must be crazy.” He shouted to no one in particular: “Turn up the thermostat in room 15!”
Just then, the elevator doors opened and out ran the hog from room 33. It tore about the lobby in crazy circles, stopping only to make a fine smelly barnyard mess in the corner. Mr. Runcible let out a squeal himself and leaped up onto the concierge counter. Olive and Mathilde chased the hog into the Rose Bar, just in time to see a brownie deftly turn it back into a barstool with a pig-leather seat.
At dawn, when the local paperboy wheeled his newspaper cart through the front entrance, he stumbled upon a peculiar scene, even by the standards of New York City.
“Thank heavens you’re here,” hollered Mr. Runcible, still huddled on top of the concierge counter. All of the waiters stood about the lobby as though rooted to the floor.
“What’s going on?” asked the paperboy, backing toward the entrance.
“We’re all glued to the floor,” yelled the headwaiter. “Give us a hand, won’t you, young man?”
But the paperboy fled—although his cart remained steadfast in the lobby floor, which was indeed covered in invisible glue. No one could budge an inch until noon, when the glue suddenly dried and cracked around their feet and Mr. Runcible’s construction workers could come in and chip everyone free.
The war raged for days.
Strange molds and vines grew from the carpets; a waterfall of honey cascaded down the mail chute; a gang of yowling one-eyed alley cats appeared and tore up all of the feather pillows in the fourth-floor rooms. The hot taps ran orange juice and cold taps ran turpentine.
Then the brownies directed their attention to the construction equipment, turning the drills to quivering Jell-O molds and the crowbars into greasy strips of bacon. They unscrewed the heads of hammers and made sure that there were plenty of fleas in the workers’ caps.
But each morning new equipment replaced the old, and more workers piled in through the front doors; Mr. Runcible directed his grunting, sweating army like a steel-fisted general. Gradually the oak disappeared entirely from the lobby walls (which received a bland coat of tapioca-colored paint), new pink-and-green carpets were stapled to the floors, the lobby took on an antiseptic-new smell, like plastic, and dull elevator music droned from newly installed stereo speakers near the ceiling.
Anything that looked old-fashioned or historic was chopped to pieces and tossed into a Dumpster outside.
The brownies were losing the war and they knew it.
Mr. Runcible was simply too determined to claim the soul of the hotel and would resort to anything. And when a man wants the soul of something but has no soul or conscience himself, he’s almost always impossible to stop. You have to sacrifice some of your own soul to beat him, which means that he wins by that much more.
The last straw, which brought out the maximum cruelty in Mr. Rex Runcible: the brownies infested the man’s mustache with worms. He shaved it off and retaliated by throwing nearly the entire hotel staff out into the street—most of whom hadn’t even been outside in years.
“You can’t stop progress,” he shouted at their backs as they stood blinking and bewildered on the front sidewalk, suitcases in hand.
The last thing to go was the grandfather clock.
It chimed sadly to itself as it lay in the Dumpster on the curb, but no one could hear it over the angry honking horns and screaming sirens.
And soon the clock went silent.
Of course Mr. Runcible hired a new chef too: a jittery, bony young man whose specialty was weird modern dishes like short ribs with chocolate-and-nettle sauce. But before the new chef toured the kitchen, the brownies coated the floor in Crisco; the chef dutifully broke his nose and several other bones. So Olive and her dad were instructed to stay until the new chef could leave the hospital.
Olive’s room was next to the kitchen. Actually, it was a big broom closet, with a makeshift bed and tiny window up near the ceiling, but it was cozy and warm and always smelled like croissants in the morning and steak béarnaise at night.
On her last night in the hotel, Olive packed quietly. She didn’t have a suitcase because she had never been anywhere outside New York City. So she stuffed her clothes and possessions into a pillowcase instead.
One by one, the brownies came into her room: some under the crack beneath the door, others through the air vent. Soon all two hundred of them stood at her feet, staring up at her sadly, wringing their nutshell hats in their hands. Mathilde squeezed fatly through the slightly open door.
Olive sat on the floor, and several of the brownies climbed up onto her crossed legs. She worried for them. She knew that her father would get a job in another hotel. These brownies, on the other hand, had been attached to the Algonquin oak for hundreds of years.
But there was no place for whimsical brownies in a hotel that stunk like plastic and was having its history and soul drained away in great gulps and gushes.
The brownies appeared to be reading her thoughts, and their little heads hung in grief and helplessness.
Then Olive had an idea. If there was no place for brownies in a modern Algonquin, maybe they could be moved someplace where modernity hadn’t happened yet.
Someplace that looked like old New York, before the settlers came and wanted bathtubs and room service.
Olive could think of only one such place in Manhattan.
“I want you to be brave and follow me,” she told the brownies. “I think I know a place where you can be happy again.”
The brownies looked at each other apprehensively.
“You can’t stay here,” Olive said. “You know that I’m not like other humans. You can trust me. Now, are you coming?”
And then, all at once, the brownies stood up straight like cadets. One of them even saluted her.
Olive picked up Mathilde and nodded at the fairies gravely. Soon hundreds of years of history were behind them and they stood on the front sidewalk. Flashing neon lights burned through the midnight air and traffic still clogged the streets.
The brownies huddled in the hotel doorway.
“Looking back will only make you sad,” Olive told them firmly.
And because Olive was indeed not like other humans and the brownies loved and trusted her, they swallowed their fear and followed her into Times Square.
Then the most extraordinary thing happened.
As Olive walked by the Dumpster on the curb, the Algonquin’s discarded grandfather clock came back to life.
Its old face glowed blue and its gears creaked and groaned, and soon they turned with ease. Then they were whirring—and one by one the lights of Times Square flickered out. A hundred thousand bulbs popped and fizzled and turned to black; darkness seeped up the sides of the buildings. Cars ground to a halt. A man lighting a cigarette froze; even the flame from his match ceased to flicker and became an orange-yellow ribbon suspended in the air.
Time and progress stopped and respectfully bowed for the last march of the brownies.
The tiny parade wound up Seventh Avenue, two hundred creatures led by a small girl and a fat
orange cat. They weaved around frozen pedestrians gleaming dully in the pale moonlight and around heaping trash bins and under blowing newspapers halted in mid-air.
Fifteen silent, still, dark city blocks later, Olive and Mathilde and the Algonquin brownies reached the entrance of tree-filled Central Park.
The brownies began to weep. Many of them had never even seen a tree, but all brownies belong to trees and most trees belong to brownies, and so they knew in their bones and blood that they were seeing home again. Several of them rushed forward, but Olive stopped them.
“Wait!” she cried. “We have to pick the right tree. After all, it will hopefully be your home for hundreds of years.”
So they walked all night and looked and perused and picked very carefully. And if you absolutely swear not to bother them and leave your camera at home, I’ll tell you how to find the new home of the Algonquin brownies.
When you walk in through the Columbus Circle entrance of Central Park, follow the path to the left. Walk north for about ten or fifteen minutes until you reach Strawberry Fields. And there, deep in this part of the park, is a fine, grand oak (the third one from the right).
If you want to make sure it’s the right one, look closely at the roots: you’ll see that the brownies have inscribed a beautiful A somewhere in the bark, to honor the memory of an Algonquin that no longer exists.
I’m fairly sure that you’ll want to know what happened to Olive.
She has moved with her father and the cat into another New York City hotel and is perfectly happy. In fact, she is now the city’s youngest pastry chef, specializing in fruit pastries—which is quite an accomplishment. But I can’t tell you which hotel; Olive is quite shy and very protective about her history with the brownies, and I must respect her privacy.
Mathilde, on the other hand, is ready to tell the story of the brownies to anyone who will listen. If you see a fat orange cat spread out across the concierge counter of a certain old-fashioned New York City hotel, you’ve likely happened across Olive’s new home.
Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties Page 2