Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library

by Chris Grabenstein

  Mr. Lemoncello touched his ear again. “Here is your Extreme Challenge. Dr. Zinchenko tells me:

  “ ‘The answer you seek …’ ”

  He paused to listen.

  “ ‘… the key to this code …

  is a memory box …

  that holds the mother lode.’ ”

  “What?”

  Mr. Lemoncello shrugged. “Sorry. I don’t write ’em. I only recite ’em. Wait. There’s more:

  “ ‘Forget the Industrial Revolution;

  my first idea is your certain solution.’ ”

  The room was silent.

  Mr. Lemoncello touched his ear once more and continued, “ ‘And now, it’s time for the addendum.’ ”

  “Huh?”

  “A last-minute addition:

  “ ‘The box had been here

  but now it is there.

  Poor Kyle. Your fate

  is up in the air.’ ”

  Mr. Lemoncello stood there grinning. For several seconds.

  “Is that it?” said Kyle.

  “Yes. Find what you’re looking for before the second-floor doors open, and it is yours. Fail, and you, Kyle, will be eliminated from the game, and your team, due to that series of unfortunate events, will be forced to struggle on without you. Good luck. You have fifteen minutes.”

  And Mr. Lemoncello left the room.

  “Dude,” said Miguel, shaking his head. “You are so dead.”

  “Wait a second,” said Haley. “I think I know how to find what Mr. Lemoncello was talking about!”

  “You do?” said Kyle.

  “I better. I’m the one who moved it from ‘here’ to ‘there’!”

  “Now then, Charles,” said Mr. Lemoncello, “would you like to utilize any of your remaining lifelines? Perhaps an Extreme Challenge? An Ask an Expert?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Charles. “And may I just say, it’s kind of you to come in here and ask me that question.”

  “Well, it’s cloudy with a chance of meatballs and I had nothing better to do.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Just a brief flight of fancy, my mind sailing off past the phantom tollbooth. So, which lifeline would you like to use?”

  “My Ask an Expert, sir.”

  “Fine. See Mrs. Tobin at the main desk. I must go to my office to monitor Kyle’s Extreme Challenge.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Trying to beat you. Tootles!”

  Mr. Lemoncello raised his beret by its stem, turned on his heel, and headed for one of the bookcases on the far side of the rotunda.

  Charles watched him tilt back the head on a bust and press a red button in the middle of what would have been the man’s neck. A door-sized section of the bookcase swung open. Mr. Lemoncello stepped into the darkness. The bookcase swung shut.

  Charles hurried to the librarian’s desk at the center of the Rotunda Reading Room.

  “Mrs. Tobin?” He clapped his hands. “Mrs. Tobin? Chop-chop. I’m in a bit of a rush. The doors upstairs will be open in thirteen minutes. Mrs. Tobin?”

  The holographic librarian finally appeared.

  “Good morning, CHARLES. How may I help you?”

  “I need to use my Ask an Expert.”

  “Very well. Whom do you wish to consult with?”

  “Someone who knows his way around a library.”

  “If that is all you require, CHARLES, perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  “I need to talk to my uncle Jimmy.”

  “Your uncle Jimmy? Could you please be more specific?”

  “Yes. Of course. James F. Willoughby the third.”

  “The James F. Willoughby the third?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The head librarian of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is your uncle?”

  “That’s right. If my mother’s brother, Uncle Jimmy, the top librarian in all of America, can’t help me find the one book I’m looking for, nobody can!”

  “The memory box is down in the Stacks,” Haley told Kyle.

  So he raced down to the basement. The very long, very wide cellar was just as he remembered it: filled with tidy rows of floor-to-ceiling shelving units.

  Kyle looked up at the closest security camera.

  “Where to next?”

  “I hid it way over on the far side,” said Haley through the ceiling speakers. “On a shelf near that horrible book-sorting machine.”

  Kyle hurried up the center aisle.

  Suddenly, a heavy metal bookcase thundered in from the right, sliding like it was on roller skates.

  “Watch it!” shouted Haley.

  The bookcase skidded to a screeching halt, blocking Kyle’s path forward.

  “Go left,” suggested Miguel.

  The whole team was watching and cheering him on.

  Kyle went left.

  And another steel shelving unit shuffled in from the side.

  “Jump back!” shouted Akimi.

  The shelf slammed to a stop two inches in front of Kyle’s feet.

  “Kyle? You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is like the hedge maze in the Triwizard Tournament,” said Sierra.

  “Huh?”

  “Harry Potter. Book four. Goblet of Fire.”

  “Right. Need to read that one, too.”

  Kyle, of course, realized he’d just discovered the most “extreme” part of his Extreme Challenge. Each one of the sliding floor-to-ceiling bookcases was loaded down with heavy cardboard cartons, books, or metal storage bins. They probably weighed several tons each. If Kyle was in the wrong place when a shelving unit came shooting in from the side, he’d be flattened like a pancake under a steamroller.

  “Warning,” announced the official-sounding lady in the ceiling. “You have twelve minutes to complete this challenge.”

  He had to keep going. Like Mr. Lemoncello said, there was no turning back now. Unless, of course, he wanted to go home a loser.

  Ha! Never!

  Kyle jogged up an alleyway between two walls of bookshelves.

  “Left turn!” Haley shouted. “Now!”

  The wall on Kyle’s right swung open, revealing six swiveling sections, each pivoting panel maybe twenty feet long, all skittering sideways and gliding backward to create new walls and reconfigured pathways.

  “You’ve only got like ten more yards to go,” coached Haley.

  Kyle weaved his way around the randomly shuffling shelves.

  But as soon as he was on any kind of straightaway, the walls started to rearrange themselves again.

  Finally, Kyle scooted down a corridor so tight he had to turn sideways to squeeze through. The walls stuttered to a stop.

  And the voice made another announcement. “Warning. You have eight minutes to complete this challenge.”

  “I’m trapped!” Kyle shouted. “There’s no exit.”

  None of his teammates said anything for a real long time.

  Finally, Sierra’s voice rang out from the overhead speakers.

  “Put your hand on the right wall,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “When I was little, I played a lot of maze games. If the walls are connected, all you have to do is keep one hand in contact with one wall at all times and eventually you’ll reach the exit or return to the entrance.”

  “Do it,” coached Akimi.

  “It’ll work, bro,” added Miguel.

  So Kyle kept his right hand firmly planted on the right wall of shelves and started inching his way forward.

  “Go, Kyle!” cheered Haley. “Hug that wall! Hug that wall!”

  The passageway widened. Kyle kept his hand glued to the right wall and went around corners, through switchbacks, until finally, he stepped into an opening near the book return conveyor belt.

  “You made it!” shouted Haley. “Whoo-hoo!”

  All the shelves streamed back into their orderly church pew positions.

  “Good,” said Kyle. “Getting
out should be easier than getting in. Where’s the box, Haley?”

  “I put it on the shelf.”

  “Which one?”

  “That one.”

  “Warning,” announced the calm female voice in the ceiling again. “You have THREE MINUTES to complete this challenge.”

  Kyle stared up at a nearby camera. “Um, Haley? What exactly am I looking for?”

  “A cardboard box. In a drawer.”

  “Okay. There are like a billion of those.…”

  “I flagged it with a piece of pink tissue.”

  Kyle raced to a shelf.

  “TWO MINUTES,” announced the calm lady.

  “This one?” said Kyle.

  “Yes! Look in the steel drawer.”

  “I thought you said it was cardboard.…”

  “It is. Open the lid. Not that lid. The other one.”

  “This one?”

  “No! The one under it!”

  “ONE MINUTE.”

  “Hurry, Kyle!”

  “I’m hurrying.”

  “Flip it open.”

  Kyle did as he was told. He flipped up the lid on a steel drawer and found a battered boot box.

  Every member of Kyle’s team shouted the same thing: “Grab it!”

  “And run!” added Akimi.

  Kyle did.

  He tucked the boot box under his arm and ran like he had never run before.

  He sprinted across the basement floor. He raced up the steps, two at a time.

  When he hit the rotunda, his heart was pounding against his ribs.

  “THIRTY SECONDS.”

  He speed-skated across the marble floor. It was so slippery he lost his balance.

  He fell forward.

  Dropped the box.

  It flew out of his hands, hit the slick floor, and slid like a hockey puck across the threshold into Community Meeting Room B.

  A buzzer sounded.

  “Time is up,” announced the calm voice.

  “Yo,” shouted Miguel, “you made it, bro!”

  And Kyle started breathing again.

  Having made his request, all Charles could do was wait.

  “Apparently,” said Mr. Lemoncello when he came back into the rotunda, “your uncle Jimmy is a very, very busy man. Reminds me of a spider I once knew. But it is a Sunday morning. We will attempt to track him down at home.”

  “Thank you, sir. I told Uncle Jimmy to stand by. That I might need him this weekend.”

  “And now—WHOOSH! He’s as elusive as the wind in the willows. You’ll have to discuss this with him the next time your family gets together for Thanksgiving dinner. Now, if you will excuse me, it is currently nine-fifty-eight a.m. Almost time to reopen the Dewey decimal chambers.”

  Mr. Lemoncello opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a megaphone.

  “Is there some room you should be ready to run to? Isn’t there some clue or book you need to go find?”

  “Just one,” said Charles. “And I need my uncle Jimmy to tell me which one it is. Will you keep looking for him? Please.”

  “Of course.” Mr. Lemoncello pointed to a smudge on Charles’s shirt. “If you like, I will also have Al Capone do your shirts.”

  All Charles could do was nod, smile, and wonder when Al Capone had opened a laundry.

  “Everyone, please pay very close attention,” cried Mr. Lemoncello through a squealing, screeching megaphone. “The Dewey decimal doors are now open and, unlike Tuck, this game will not be everlasting. Therefore, it is time to race upstairs like the rats of NIMH!”

  Kyle and his teammates heard Mr. Lemoncello’s announcement but stayed inside Community Meeting Room B so they could examine the dusty old boot box.

  “It’s from when Mr. Lemoncello was our age,” said Haley. “Here. I’m pretty sure this is what we need.” She handed Kyle a large manila envelope sealed up with tons of tape. “First and Worst Idea Ever” had been scribbled on the front.

  “Awesome,” said Kyle as he started undoing the tape. “The clue said his first idea might be our best solution.”

  Inside the envelope were a stack of cards, a bunch of rubber stamps, an ink pad, and a sheet of three-ring-binder paper filled with a fifth grader’s sloppy handwriting.

  Kyle read out loud what the young Luigi Lemoncello had written: “ ‘Presenting First Letters: the Amazingly Incredible Secret Code Game.’ ”

  Haley held up some of the cards. Each one showed a cartoony drawing and a single letter: Apple = A, Bee = B, Carrot = C, and so on.

  Kyle continued reading: “ ‘Want to send your friend a secret message to meet you after school? Just use your super-secret rubber stamps.’ ”

  Miguel examined a couple of the wood-handled stamps. “The stamps match the cards.”

  “So how exactly do you use this junk to tell your friends to meet you after school?” asked Akimi.

  “This is so bad,” said Kyle. “ ‘Moon, Elephant, Elephant, Tiger. Moon, Elephant. Apple, Flamingo …’ ”

  Akimi held up her hand. “Okay. Stop. I get it.”

  “Maybe it was for little kids,” said Sierra.

  “Definitely,” said Kyle. “Because anybody over the age of six could crack this code in like ten seconds.”

  And then he froze.

  “This is it!”

  He went to the wall with the list of library cards. “What would happen if we played First Letters with these book titles?”

  BOOKS/AUTHORS ON THE BACKS OF LIBRARY CARDS

  #1 Miguel Fernandez

  Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert/

  No, David! by David Shannon

  #2 Akimi Hughes

  One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

  by Dr. Seuss/Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

  #3 Andrew Peckleman

  Six Days of the Condor by James Grady/

  Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott

  #4 Bridgette Wadge

  Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

  by Judy Blume/Harry Potter and the

  Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

  #5 Sierra Russell

  The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder/

  The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

  #6 Yasmeen Smith-Snyder

  Around the World in Eighty Days

  by Jules Verne/The Yak Who Yelled Yuck

  by Carol Pugliano-Martin

  #7 Sean Keegan

  Olivia by Ian Falconer/Unreal! by Paul Jennings

  #8 Haley Daley

  Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm/

  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

  #9 Rose Vermette

  All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor/

  Scat by Carl Hiaasen

  #10 Kayla Corson

  Anna to the Infinite Power

  by Mildred Ames/Where the Sidewalk

  Ends by Shel Silverstein

  #11 UNKNOWN/CHARLES CHILTINGTON

  #12 Kyle Keeley

  I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt/

  The Napping House by Audrey Wood

  “Okay,” said Miguel, moving to a clean space on the wall. “Here are the first letters of all the titles.”

  I N O N S E T H T T A T O U T A A S A W ? ? I T

  “It still makes no sense,” said Akimi.

  “Wait a second,” said Sierra. “If the title starts with an article, drop that word, and use the letter from the second word.”

  “Got it,” said Miguel.

  I N O N S E T H E W A Y O U T W A S A W ? ? I N

  “Okay,” said Akimi. “It’s making some sense.”

  She went to the board and broke Miguel’s string of letters into words.

  I /N O N /S E T /H E /W A Y/ O U T/ W A S /A /W ? ?/ I N

  “Hang on,” said Kyle. “It could be …”

  I N/ O N /S E/ T H E /W A Y/ O U T/ W A S /A /W ? ?/ I N

  “What’s ‘In on se’?” said Akimi.

  “Wait! Look!” said Miguel. “The books on the second and third library
cards actually start with numbers!”

  Kyle grabbed a marker:

  I N/ 1 9 6 8/ T H E /W A Y/ O U T/ W A S /A /W ? ?/ I N

  “Hang on,” said Haley. “You know all those questions in the trivia contest Friday? I did so badly, I Googled a bunch of them later that night. They were all from 1968.”

  “You guys?” said Sierra. “I did some research, too. Mr. Lemoncello was born in 1956. That means he turned twelve in 1968.”

  “Oh-kay,” said Akimi. “Is this something besides a fun fact to know and tell?”

  “You bet it is,” said Kyle. “Nineteen sixty-eight is key. And we don’t need Charles’s library card to finish this phrase.” He went to the whiteboard.

  IN 1968, THE WAY OUT WAS A WAY IN.

  “So what happened in 1968?” said Haley.

  “Was that when Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out?” asked Miguel.

  “No,” said Sierra. “Nineteen sixty-four.”

  “So what’s up with the candy clue from the Art and Artifacts Room?”

  “We messed up,” said Akimi. “We need to go back and find a new rhyme for ‘Andy’!”

  “Really?” said Haley. “I thought he got kicked out for cheating.”

  “Another long story,” said Miguel.

  “For later,” said Kyle. “Right now, we need to be on the third floor!”

  Back in the Art & Artifacts Room, Kyle felt confident they were pretty close to figuring out, well, whatever it was they were supposed to figure out.

  How it would help them escape from the library was still anybody’s guess.

  “It’s ten-forty-four,” said Akimi. “The last clue should pop up on the Wonder Dome in sixteen minutes.”

  “Okay, you guys,” said Kyle. “Spread out. We need a new rhyme for ‘Andy.’ ”

  “This model of the bank building came in handy,” added Miguel.

  “The Dandy Bandits!” shouted Akimi, once again studying the display of hats.