Her friend sighed. “Whatever it is, it’s extremely annoying.”
We turned another corner and ran up the street toward an enormous pale brick building surrounded by an iron fence. Flags waved from the fence posts, and rows of men in neat uniforms stood at attention in front of the gate. “Where are you going?” Rosemary shouted at Arthur. “You can’t go in there. That’s a palace!”
“I know!” Arthur ran straight up to the rows of men in uniforms, stopped, and gave a hurried salute. To my surprise, the men in uniforms saluted back.
“I need you to let the three of us in,” Arthur told them, “but lock the gate behind us, and don’t let any of those people in suits get inside.” He pointed behind us at the travel officers, who were rushing down the street toward us, all looking extremely out of breath.
“Certainly,” said one of the uniformed men. As Rosemary and I stared at each other and then at Arthur, the man hurried us through the gate. “Will there be anything else, Your Highness?”
“That’s all for now, thank you,” said Arthur, and all the men in uniforms saluted him again. Then they turned their attention back to the street, ordering all the travel officers to halt in the name of the king. I could hear Michael trying to argue his way into the palace grounds, but none of the uniformed men seemed particularly impressed.
Arthur had sat down on the grassy lawn in front of the palace to catch his breath. “We should be safe here,” he said. “Even Mrs. Bracknell isn’t a match for my father’s royal sentries.” He took a long breath in and lay back on the grass. “It’s lucky we turned out to be so close to home.”
Rosemary was still gaping at him, so I had to be the one to ask. “Arthur,” I said carefully, “are you actually a prince?”
“Of course,” said Arthur. “I told you that ages ago.”
“I didn’t realize you were telling the truth!” I said, sitting down next to him. “I thought you were pretending.”
“You did?” Arthur sounded genuinely surprised. “But you’ve called me ‘Your Highness’ before.”
“I was joking!”
Arthur frowned. “It’s not a very funny joke.”
WE BELIEVED YOU, the bees assured him. BEES CAN TELL THESE THINGS.
Maybe they could, but I wished they’d told the rest of us. “Your father’s really a king, then?” I asked.
“Not a very important one,” said Arthur. “Our country is so small it doesn’t even get printed on maps. I’m sure you’ve never heard of it.”
I looked over his head at the enormous palace. Being in charge of a whole country, even one I’d never heard of, didn’t sound so unimportant to me. “Will you be a king, too, then, someday?”
“Oh, no. I’ve got seven older brothers. When there are seven princes already, no one gets particularly excited about the eighth.”
Rosemary was excited, though. “Do you have bodyguards?” she wanted to know. “And someone to taste your soup in case it’s been poisoned? Do you wear a crown? Does everyone kneel when you walk into a room?”
Arthur laughed. “It’s not really like that. The crown is only for special occasions, and no one ever kneels, thank goodness. I’d feel awful about it if they did.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned in a very un-royal way. “Anyway, I’m not at the palace very often anymore. I’m usually at school on the other side of the kingdom. My father says my tutors will prepare me for the future, but they never mentioned anything to me about other worlds, so I’m not sure they’re quite as smart as Father thinks.”
The sentries had turned all the travel officers away from the gate now. “You can’t stay in there forever,” Michael shouted to us over his shoulder as a guard marched him back down the street. “Don’t think I won’t tell Mrs. Bracknell about this!”
“Oh, I’m sure you will,” Rosemary called back. “Please send her our best!”
We all waved cheerfully as Michael disappeared the way he’d come. “He’s right, though, you know,” I said, sitting down next to the others. “We can’t stay here forever. We’re supposed to be looking for the gatekeepers, and I don’t think they’re likely to be anywhere in this world. Mrs. Bracknell doesn’t own any property in East.”
“Even if the gatekeepers were here, we’d have an awful time trying to find them,” said Rosemary, flopping back into the grass. “East is huge. Sarah said our sister Tillie is in a place called Iceland. Is Iceland anywhere near here?” She sounded hopeful, but Arthur said it wasn’t.
“Well, we’ve got no chance of getting to Northwest,” I said, “since the door that leads there isn’t opened yet. We could try to get to Northeast, but all those travel officers will be waiting to arrest us as soon as we walk back through the worldgate. Maybe we are stuck here forever.”
Arthur assured us that there were worse places to be stuck. “You can all come back to school with me,” he said. “My tutors can teach you how to solve equations and read things in Latin. The bees could live in the school meadow!”
Rosemary stuck out her tongue at the suggestion. “Maybe princes go to school,” she said, “but smugglers don’t.”
As nice as East seemed, I wasn’t sure I was ready to live the rest of my life there. “You were supposed to be meeting your tutor when you came through the door at the end of the world, weren’t you?” I asked Arthur.
“That’s right. I was at the library, avoiding him, and I found a little doorway I’d never seen before.”
“And you fell through it.”
“Right,” said Arthur. “And then you were there, and the bees . . .”
I remembered all that well enough. “Could you take us there?”
“To the library?” Arthur asked. “Of course, but there won’t be much to see. I’m sure the door at the end of the world is just as broken on this side as it is on the other one.” He lowered his voice. “Especially since I snapped that key in the lock.”
“You did what?” said Rosemary.
“We’ll tell you the whole story later,” I promised her. “And I know we probably won’t be able to get through that door, but I’d like to see the library anyway. It’s where the Gatekeeper was going when she disappeared. Someone there might know what happened to her.”
“This isn’t going to work,” Rosemary grumbled as we trudged across a green park toward the old stone library. It was autumn in East, and dried leaves covered the grass. Two of the king’s sentries had driven us here, and now they walked a respectful distance behind us in case we happened to need protection from any suit-clad travel officers or furious private secretaries. “I don’t want to crush your spirits, Lucy, but no one in East ever notices anything. I’ve been through this worldgate a few times myself, and I can tell you that even if ten of Mrs. Bracknell’s finest officers had tackled the Gatekeeper right there in the middle of the library, no one would have looked up long enough to wonder what was going on.”
“We’re not as bad as all that,” said Arthur. “I’m sure I would have noticed someone getting hauled away by Interworld Travel.”
Rosemary crunched through a pile of leaves. “You didn’t even know a door to another world was right in front of your face until you fell through it.”
“That,” said Arthur, “is because I’m farsighted!”
I couldn’t imagine how anyone hadn’t known about a worldgate built in such a public place, but when we stepped inside the library, I began to understand how Arthur could have missed it. The building was old and vast, with winding back staircases, secret nooks carved out of the walls, and endless shelves of books. Although the worldgate was closed now, it wasn’t easy to make our way from room to room without getting hopelessly lost.
“I hope I can find that door again,” said Arthur. “I think I was near the astronomy encyclopedias, or maybe it was the Portuguese dictionaries. . . .” He trailed off, leading us up the main staircase, through a reading room lit by crystal chandeliers, and into a thicket of reference materials. I wondered how many books had vanished from th
e library stacks over the years, and how the people who lived nearby had accounted for all the rainstorms and cyclones that must have passed through the area. “Maybe they rounded up some scientists and told them to study the weather,” Rosemary suggested when I asked. “That’s the sort of thing Easterners would do—assuming they noticed it at all.”
Easterners really didn’t notice much, I realized: even though a prince, two bedraggled girls with rucksacks, and some royal sentries were parading through the library, the other patrons hardly bothered to look up. They must have watched plenty of explorers, tourists, smugglers, and diplomats pass through the door at the end of the world, all without batting an eye.
“The door is this way,” said Rosemary at last. She pointed toward a darkened back hallway. “This is the exact place where my pa once dropped all the glass jars of powdered hot pepper we were bringing home to sell, and everyone in the building started to sneeze. It was a miracle we weren’t caught in the act.” She shook her head. “Poor old Bernard. I hope he’s all right. He wasn’t a very good gatekeeper.”
We followed Rosemary into the hallway, where the only sounds were the hiss of a furnace and the quick footsteps of distant librarians. The air was thick with the smell of old books, and the walls were papered with flyers taped up by people who’d lost things at the library: jewelry, umbrellas, winter hats. Most of them, I assumed, had never found what they were looking for.
At the end of the hall was a door painted green. “This is it,” said Rosemary. A sign nailed to the doorframe said Special Collections, and a metal folding chair rested against the wall. I wondered if that was where Bernard used to sit.
Arthur looked around and nodded. “This is where I was standing right before I met you, Lucy. Isn’t it funny to think your gatehouse is on the other side of this door?”
“It used to be, at least,” I said. I wondered what was there now—just a blank wall like the one I’d seen behind the door at Interworld Travel? Whatever it was, I didn’t feel anywhere close to home.
The door was stuck shut, of course. It didn’t open when I pulled on it, or when Rosemary pushed it, and certainly not when Arthur knocked politely, but I hadn’t really expected it to. Even the bees were thwarted when they tried to fly through the gap under the door. NO USE, they reported back. THE WORLDGATE IS GONE.
There was a squeaking noise behind us, and we turned around to see a woman rolling an empty metal cart down the hall. According to a pin on her shirt, she was a reference librarian. “May I help you?” she asked.
Arthur’s face lit up. “Actually, I think you can. Do you have a moment to talk about the end of the world?”
“What he means,” I said quickly, “is that we’re wondering if you’ve seen anything strange happening near this door recently.”
The librarian made a little humming noise as she thought. “Bernard would be the best person to ask about that,” she said. “He’s in charge of the collection back there. I haven’t ever seen it myself. Bernard is very particular about who he allows in.”
“And Bernard is here right now?”
“Well, no,” said the librarian. “I haven’t seen him for a while, as a matter of fact. I think he must be on vacation.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Rosemary said under her breath.
The librarian’s brow creased, as if it bothered her to give an unsatisfactory answer to anyone’s question. “Would you like to arrange a time to see the collection when Bernard comes back?”
“No, thank you,” I said. Rosemary had been right after all: this wasn’t going to work. No one in this world knew what had happened to the gatekeepers, and even if they had, we wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. All the royal sentries in the king’s palace wouldn’t be defense enough if we tried to go back through the open worldgate while everyone still believed the stories Mrs. Bracknell was telling about us.
“I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” the librarian was saying. “I wish Bernard had let us know he was planning to take time off. He didn’t even leave his keys behind. All the patrons who’ve stopped by to see the collection have been so disappointed.”
Rosemary nudged me with her elbow. “We’re not the only ones you’ve spoken to?”
“Not at all,” said the librarian. “I’ve turned at least five people away, and some of them were very angry when I did it. One gentleman actually threw a compass at me, if you can believe it!” (I could.) “And there’s an old woman who turns up every day to shout at the door and whack it with her cane. I’ve asked her more than once to stop, but she keeps coming back.” The librarian smiled a little. “I suppose I have seen a few strange things happening here, now that I think about it.”
“An old woman,” I said. “With frizzy white hair?”
“Extremely frizzy,” said the librarian.
“And she comes here every day?” I was trying to stay calm, but my words rushed out in spite of themselves, and the bees began to clamor above us.
The librarian glanced up at them. “Every day for the past week or so, and always precisely at noon. How did those bees get in here?”
“They’re friends of ours,” Arthur reassured her. “Lucy, are you all right?”
“What time is it?” I asked. “Is it noon yet?”
The librarian glanced at her watch. “It’s two twenty-three.” There was that crease in her brow again. “But if you’re looking for the woman with the cane, I’ve seen her walking sometimes in the school meadow. Does that help you solve your problem?”
“Oh, yes.” I beamed at Arthur and Rosemary. Rosemary’s jaw was in the process of dropping, and Arthur looked totally mystified, but that made sense: he’d never met the Gatekeeper. “It helps more than you know.”
27
In the school meadow, a wiry woman in a witchy black cloak stomped through the grass. I would have known that stomp in this world or any other.
“Gatekeeper!” I called as I ran toward her. “Gatekeeper, are you all right?”
The Gatekeeper looked up and squinted at me in the autumn sunlight. Then she leaned forward on her cane and squinted some more. “Lucy Eberslee? For worlds’ sake, my girl!” She let out a loud, crackling laugh as the bees swarmed around her and I gave her a hug. “Now, there’s no need to get sentimental,” she said, but she didn’t push me away or thwack me with her cane. Her cloak was damp and caked in dirt, and she looked bonier than ever. “How did you get here?” she asked, looking me up and down. “And what do you think you’re doing in East? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten our rules!”
“Don’t leave the end of the world for any reason?” I couldn’t help laughing. “I’m sorry, Gatekeeper. I broke that one ages ago. And I haven’t been eating many vegetables, either. No wonder Mrs. Bracknell terminated me.”
I could see the Gatekeeper’s hair frizzing on the spot. She thumped her cane three times on the ground. “Stop right there,” she said, “and reverse course, and tell me everything. I’d like to hear from the people standing behind you, too, once they’ve stopped gawking.”
The three of us told the Gatekeeper as much as we could remember, and the bees filled in what we couldn’t. If anything surprised her, she didn’t show it, but she did shake her head when we told her how we’d gotten to East. “A new worldgate only hours from here,” she said, “and I’ve been wasting my time shouting at that door in the library?”
“There’s no way you could have known,” I told her.
“Don’t be kind, Lucy. I can follow the thunderclouds as well as anyone.” The Gatekeeper glowered. “I complained years ago, you know, when Clara Bracknell was chosen to lead Interworld Travel. Her only interest in other worlds has always been what she can take from them if they won’t give it willingly. Never wanted to hear what we gatekeepers had to say about things, either. Well, she’ll be hearing from me now, whether she likes it or not.”
The Gatekeeper had been living in the meadow all this time, she told us, sleeping on the matted grass
under a stand of trees, ducking into the library when it rained, and hitting the glass-fronted snack dispensers with her cane at mealtimes until a packet of something crunchy or spicy jogged free. Arthur was so horrified to hear this that he told the royal sentries to drive us all back to the palace at once. “We’ve got real food there,” he assured her, “and a very nice roof, and beds with sheets. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.” The Gatekeeper harrumphed, but she didn’t say no.
Rosemary hadn’t said much since we’d found the Gatekeeper. Maybe she didn’t want anything to do with the woman who’d once sent her pa to prison, I thought, or maybe she was just in awe. I’d seen plenty of people go suddenly quiet in the Gatekeeper’s presence. Once we’d all piled into the palace car, though, she leaned over and nudged me with her elbow. “Isn’t anyone going to ask it?”
I had no idea what she meant. “Ask what?”
“What’s happened to the other gatekeepers!” said Rosemary. “Didn’t Henry Tallard say there are sixteen missing? I thought we’d find them all together somewhere, but I didn’t see anyone else wandering through that meadow.”
I hadn’t seen anyone, either. I’d been so happy to see the Gatekeeper that I’d barely noticed anything else, and I certainly hadn’t remembered to look for fifteen more people. “You’re right,” I said. “There’s Florence, and Bernard. . . .”
“Poor Bernard.” The Gatekeeper sighed. “What a fool.”
Arthur looked pale. “Is he—”
“Alive? Dead? I’ve got no idea.” The Gatekeeper laid her cane down by her feet, and the bees settled on her lap. “I don’t know where they took him. All I know is that if it hadn’t been for the glue, they would have taken me along with him.” She closed her eyes and leaned back in her seat, as though this explained everything.
I put a hand on the Gatekeeper’s shoulder. “I know you must be tired,” I said, “but you’re going to have to tell us what happened to you once you went through the door at the end of the world.”
Her eyes flicked open again, and she peered at me. “Lucy Eberslee,” she said again. “You’ve changed. I like it.” She stifled a yawn. “Do you remember those two travel officers who went through our worldgate on Maintenance Day?”
The Door at the End of the World Page 16