Polly Shulman

by The Grimm Legacy (v5)

  “How can boots not work?”

  He peered at me. “I think I’d better speak to a librarian. Could you get me your supervisor, please?”

  “Okay.” I took the boots over to Anjali. “Where do they keep the phone around here?” I asked her. “I need Ms. Callender.”

  “Ask Sarah to send her a pneum. Why, what’s up?”

  “Some patron’s insisting these boots were mislabeled. It’s weird. He says they don’t work.”

  “What? Show me.” Anjali sounded alarmed. I handed her the boots. “Oh, let’s not bother Ms. Callender about this,” she said hurriedly. “You can handle things without me for a few minutes, can’t you? I’ll be right back.” She went to the window and spoke to the patron, then hurried out.

  I had a hard time keeping up with the arriving objects. One dumbwaiter would ping while I was taking something out of another, then the third would chime and open. Things kept piling up as I ran back and forth between the dumbwaiters and the desk. I wondered how Anjali had managed it all so gracefully.

  A line formed at the window, and the patrons started murmuring, a soft but threatening noise. The little man with the beard frowned at me when I let one of the globes slip and hit the base against the desk. I was relieved when Anjali came back with a pair of boots in her hand.

  “Good, you’re back—I was starting to panic. Are those the right boots?”

  “Yes, they were misshelved.”

  “So that’s a different pair?” They looked the same to me.

  She nodded and beckoned to the boot patron, who took the new boots and sniffed at them.

  After a muttered conversation with Anjali that I couldn’t hear over the conveyor belt, he left with the boots, apparently satisfied.

  “Everything cool?” I asked Anjali.

  “Yes, it’s fine now,” she said. “You don’t need to bother Ms. Callender about it. I straightened it out.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  When Ms. Callender came in with Marc, Anjali looked momentarily worried, but she relaxed when he smiled at her reassuringly.

  Ms. Callender consulted her clipboard. “Marc, you’re on dumbwaiters. Sarah, man the window, okay, hon? And Anjali, would you mind showing Elizabeth how to handle the tubes? I’ll be on 6 if you run into any difficulties.”

  Anjali pointed me to the stool where Sarah had been sitting. She pulled up another wheeled stool in front of the tangle of tubes, where the pneums were hammering down.

  “We’re basically operating a switchboard,” she told me. “All the pneum stations all over the building have a tube that leads here to us. A few of them are connected directly to each other, but most of them aren’t, so if someone wants to send a pneum from Stack 4, say, to Stack 7, it has to go through us.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.

  “It is. We have to send them on quickly or the whole system backs up, and it’s easy to make a mistake. But don’t worry too much—if you send a pneum to the wrong stack, they’ll just send it back here.”

  The job was exhausting yet exhilarating, like a video game. I had a thousand rules to remember. Anything in a red pneum went to Stack 6, where the librarians had their offices. Blue pneums went straight to Dr. Rust. Pneums carrying call slips went to the appropriate stack. I had to memorize which stack held which collection. Tools were on Stack 5, household items on 9, fungibles on 8.

  “What on earth is a fungible?” I asked Anjali.

  “Something that needs a lot of replacing.”

  “You mean things like lightbulbs and paper towels?”

  “No, that’s ephemera, on Stack 3. Well, the paper towels are. Lightbulbs are in various places. Some are on 5, Tools and Scientific Instruments; some are on 9, Household Goods.”

  “Oh, okay. But what are fungibles?”

  “Plants and animals.”

  “What? You’re kidding! Is this like a zoo or something? Can people check out, like, a giraffe?”

  “I doubt it,” said Anjali with a grin. “I don’t think we have any giraffes in the collection. If we did, they’d be in the annex anyway.”

  “What’s the annex?”

  “Off-site oversize storage. Those are call slips that start with *A. Like, here’s one—oops, no, that’s a *V.”

  “What’s a *V?”

  “Valuable items. They’re kept on the same stack as the rest of the things in their category. Pages aren’t allowed to run those slips. Only librarians have the keys, so send *V call slips to Stack 6.”

  “Oh, right—like Marie Antoinette’s wig?” I asked. “Ms. Callender showed me, in a locked room on Stack 2.”

  “Exactly.”

  I routed a request for a teapot to Stack 9, one for a guitar to Stack 4, and three for hats to Stack 2.

  It took me a while to get the hang of the tubes themselves. I kept snapping the doors on my thumb. Eventually, though, I fell into a sort of meditative rhythm. My hands flew peacefully from basket to tube. The hiss and clatter and creak of the machines began to feel like forest sounds: the rush of a waterfall, the rustle of leaves, the chatter of squirrels. Out of the corners of my eyes, I seemed to see things moving in the stained-glass windows—birds, branches, water—though I knew that was impossible.

  A call slip beginning *WB landed in the basket. “What’s *WB?” I asked Anjali.

  “That’s the Wells Bequest—next door to the Grimm Collection. Send it down to the Dungeon—Stack 1.”

  The Dungeon again. That was obviously where they kept the most interesting stuff. “What’s in the Wells Bequest?” I asked.

  Anjali took a deep breath and looked sideways. I could tell she was preparing to not answer my question, so I said quickly, “Dr. Rust told me the Grimm Collection is full of things the Brothers Grimm found when they were collecting fairy tales.” I hoped Anjali would take that as permission to talk. “Is the Wells Bequest more fairy-tale stuff?”

  It worked. “Sort of—it’s science fiction,” she said. “It’s named after H. G. Wells, who wrote The Time Machine.”

  “Oh—so what’s in the bequest? Is there, like, a time machine?” I joked.

  Marc overheard me. He glared at Anjali from the desk. She got cagey.

  “It’s hard to say. I don’t know anybody who’s tried it,” she said.

  “Tried what?”

  “The time machine.”

  “So there is a time machine?” That was crazy. “What else is in there?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, lots of things. That’s really Aaron’s department. You should ask him about it if you’re interested. He’s kind of a science-fiction expert.”

  Like Aaron would tell me anything! “Okay, but what’s the collection all about? Is it stuff that inspired famous science-fiction books?”

  “Yes, exactly! That kind of thing.”

  “Why’s it called the Wells Bequest? Did the objects used to belong to H. G. Wells?”

  “A few of them, but there are other things too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Shrink rays and miniature rockets and so forth.”

  That had to be a joke. “Do they work?” I asked, playing along.

  “Well, the rockets work. It’s not hard to make a miniature rocket. I made one myself last year, for the science fair.”

  “What about the shrink rays?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What else is down there?”

  “Where, the Dungeon? Well, there’s the Garden of Seasons. And the Gibson Chrestomathy and the Lovecraft Corpus. They’re both fairly recent additions.”

  Marc came over to our station. “You’re telling her about that?” he said to Anjali. He sounded alarmed.

  “It’s okay, Merritt—Doc already told her about the Grimm Collection.”

  “Did she get her key yet?”

  Anjali raised her eyebrows at me inquiringly.

  “What key?” I asked.

  “Anjali!” said Marc.

  “It’s okay,” said Anjal
i. “She’s one of the good ones. I have a sense for these things—I recognized you, didn’t I?”

  “If you say so,” said Marc dubiously.

  “What key?” I asked again.

  “You’ll find out soon enough, if Anjali’s right,” said Marc.

  “So what’s in the Gibson Crestothingy and the Lovecraft Corpus? And the Garden of Seasons?” I asked.

  “The Gibson Chrestomathy is mostly software and computer technology,” said Anjali.

  “Really? I thought all that was on Stack 5, Tools.”

  “Most of it is. They keep the . . . special stuff downstairs.”

  “What kinds of things are in the Gibson thingy, then?”

  “The Chrestomathy? Artificial intelligence, interesting computer viruses, that kind of thing.”

  “And the Garden of Seasons?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Marc. “I’ve never been in there. It’s supposed to be as amazing as the Tiffany windows.”

  I made a mental note to check out the garden if I ever could. “And what about the Lovecraft Corpus, what’s that?” I asked.

  “Don’t talk about that! You shouldn’t even be thinking about it,” Marc said. “Anjali shouldn’t have mentioned it. Don’t go down there.”

  “Why? What’s in it?”

  “I’m serious. Stay out of the Lovecraft Corpus! That place is bad news.”

  I really had to get down to the Dungeon soon, I decided. Even if Anjali and Marc were pulling my leg about some of these things, it sounded like all the really fascinating—and maybe dangerous—stuff was in the Special Collections, and I wanted to see it.

  Chapter 6:

  The Grimm Collection

  The next Saturday, Ms. Callender sent me down to Stack 2 with a hand truck of returns from the City Opera costume department. I had spent an hour packing sequined gowns in muslin dust bags and telling myself that at least it was more glamorous than putting away my own laundry, when a high, insistent voice interrupted me. I looked up and saw a little boy.

  He looked like somebody, for a joke, had made an exact copy of Marc Merritt in miniature. He was dressed just like Marc, in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and bright white sneakers. He had the same big brown eyes and the same long, curly eyelashes. His cheeks were rounder, his skin a deeper brown, and his arms and legs proportionally shorter, but he had the same firm chin and the same determined frown.

  “I gotta go,” he said.

  “Go where? Where’d you come from?” I asked.

  A crazy thought crossed my mind. Maybe there really was a shrink ray in the Wells Bequest, and Marc had gotten caught in it. Maybe this was Marc.

  “I gotta go,” said mini-Marc again. “Gonna have a accident.” He danced back and forth from one foot to the other.

  “Oh! You mean the bathroom?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “Okay, hang in there. This way.” If finger acid was bad for the collection, I could only imagine what urine would do to it. I hurried him down the hall to the ladies’ room.

  Unfortunately, there was an icon of a person in a triangular skirt on the door. “That’s the girls’ room,” he objected.

  “Yeah, but I can’t take you into the boys’ room—I’m a girl. It’s okay; they have toilets in here too. Come on.” I held the door open.

  He hesitated, then followed me in.

  “You want me to help you?” I asked. He nodded. Feeling ridiculous for even entertaining the thought, I really, really hoped this wasn’t Marc. How embarrassing would that be?

  Of course, a shrink ray might make a guy smaller, but it wouldn’t turn him into a three-year-old. I found that comforting at first, until it occurred to me that a time machine might.

  Don’t be silly, I told myself.

  “All done,” said mini-Marc.

  I buttoned him up. “Let’s wash your hands,” I said, lifting him up so he could reach the faucet. Then he wanted to use the hand dryer for longer than seemed entirely necessary.

  “Come on, buddy, I’ve got to get back to work, and your mom’s going to wonder what happened to you,” I told him.

  He reluctantly let me lead him out into the hall. Once there, he started charging down it. I ran to catch up. “Hey! Where are you going?”

  “I gotta find my butter.”

  “Okay, kid, hold your horses. Where’s your mom? Maybe we should take you to Ms. Callender.”

  “I gotta find my butter! Butter! Butter!”

  “Hey, calm down, sweetie. What is it? Are you hungry?” I knelt and took him by the shoulders. He shook me off and started stomping his feet.

  “Where’s my butter? I want my butter!”

  “Andre? Andre, where are you?” Marc Merritt appeared as if by magic at the end of the hall. He was full size. I felt a wave of embarrassment for having imagined that he’d been tampered with by a shrink ray.

  The kid—Andre—ran to him, his little feet thudding like pneums, and threw himself against Marc’s legs, crying, “Butter!”

  Marc knelt down and hugged him. “Brother yourself! Where’d you go to? Didn’t I tell you to stay put? You scared me! Don’t ever do that, okay?”

  “Sorry, Butter. I hadda go,” explained Andre. “The girl taked me.”

  Marc looked up as if noticing me for the first time. The look was not altogether friendly. He often looked arrogant, but this time I felt as if he was accusing me of something.

  “I took him to the bathroom,” I said. “He said he was going to have an accident. So he’s your brother?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s Andre. Thanks,” he said, thawing a little. “Say thank you to Elizabeth, Andre.”

  “Thank you, Libbet,” said Andre.

  “Did you wash your hands?” asked Marc.

  “Yeah, I like the wind thing. It goes fffffffffff, fffffffffff, fffffffffff. It’s the girls’ room. They have toilets there too.”

  Marc swung him to his shoulder as lightly as if he were lifting a kitten, not a solidly built three-year-old. “Okay, bro, let’s get you to day care. Say bye to Elizabeth.”

  “Bye-bye, Libbet,” said Andre, waving at me.

  “Bye, Andre.”

  “Thanks, Elizabeth,” said Marc, more warmly this time. “Thanks for taking care of him. Sorry for the trouble.”

  It felt good to have Marc Merritt thanking me. I watched as he carried Andre off down the hallway.

  I noticed he was wearing the brown work boots again. Were they his? I found myself wondering. Or were they the mysteriously misshelved ones? Stop it, I told myself. If I wanted to make friends, I needed to be more trusting.

  I finished putting away the opera gowns and trundled my hand truck back to the staging area. Aaron was sitting at his usual desk. He was mending something under a bright lamp, which cast the usual sharp shadows across his cheekbones.

  “Anjali?” he said, looking up.

  “No, just Elizabeth,” I answered, slightly testily.

  His face fell. “Oh. Hi, Elizabeth.” I could hear the disappointment in his voice. How flattering.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m darning a sock,” he said, holding it up to show me.

  “What’s that lump inside it?”

  “A sock egg.”

  “A sock egg? I didn’t know socks hatched from eggs.”

  “Only the best ones do. I can’t wear the cheap kind, the ones that grow on trees. They give me blisters.”

  “Riiiiight, okay. Is that from the Grimm Collection?” I asked.

  “Of course not. It’s just an ordinary sock egg,” he said shortly.

  “I meant the sock.”

  “Why would it be? And why do you keep asking about the Grimm Collection?”

  “Because it makes you mad, and you look so funny when you snarl,” I said. “Is it? The sock, I mean. From the Grimm Collection.”

  “No, it’s from my sock drawer. It got a hole. My toe was poking through—it was very uncomfortable.”

  “Oh.” I was kind
of impressed, despite myself. How many guys would bother to sew up a hole in their sock? “Seriously, what’s a sock egg?” I asked.

  He reached into the sock and pulled it out. It looked like an ordinary chicken’s egg made of wood. “You put it in the sock to stretch it out where the hole is so you can sew it up more evenly,” he said.

  “I see,” I said. “That’s kind of a clever idea. I wonder who thought of it. Do you think the first sock eggs were real eggs?”

  “No way. Too fragile. That would be pretty gross, if you broke an egg in your sock.”

  “So what do you think the first ones were?”

  He shrugged. “Round stones, probably. If you’re really curious, you could take a look at the egg collection.”

  “The Egg Collection? Is that like the Grimm Collection?”

  He snorted. “Of course not. I just meant the various eggs in the repository.”

  “There are eggs here?”

  “Sure, lots of different kinds.”

  “Hard boiled? Over easy?”

  “Ukrainian Easter eggs. China eggs for tricking hens into laying. Ostrich eggs with scenes painted on them. Even a few fossilized dinosaur eggs.”

  “Wow, what do those look like?”

  “Big and round.”

  “Could you use them to darn socks?”

  “If you had giant feet.” He looked at my feet and grinned.

  I’m a little sensitive about the size of my feet, and I felt myself begin to blush.

  To cover my embarrassment, I said, “How do you know they’re dinosaur eggs and not giant eggs from the giant bird?”

  “What giant bird?” Aaron sounded alarmed.

  “The one that’s supposedly following people around and stealing their objects.”

  His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Who told you about that? Marc?”

  “No, Anjali.”

  “Oh. Well, she shouldn’t be talking about that. And you certainly shouldn’t be joking about it!”

  “Why not? Do you honestly believe there’s a giant bird stealing things?”

  “Maybe. But it’s nothing to joke about, anyway.”

  “Elizabeth?” said someone behind me. This time it was Anjali.

  “Anjali!” Aaron said again, his voice full of pleasure like a kid who hears the ice-cream truck. He hadn’t sounded like that when he was talking to me. I decided I hated him.