by Ray Hudson
A few colorful beach chairs at the edge of a lake were replaced by the crowded seats of an airplane.
I yanked myself back to attention.
I needed an explanation. About everything.
It wasn’t much later, but it was later. I put the bookmark and the paperback into my pack and started back.
“She’s sleeping,” the Elder Cousin said when he opened the door.
“Did you call the police?”
“It’s all been reported.”
“I have something to show you.” I dug into my pack.
“Come back in an hour. She’ll be up then.” He started to shut the door, reopened it, and said, “Thanks, Booker.”
I sat down on the steps. The bookmark was in my hand. It was a little bent. The scenes kept playing. A jogging trail dipped into a crowded subway car that lurched into a hammock hanging between two trees.
I was about to drop it into the pack when I realized it could get really bent. I took out Death and the Uphill Gardener. On the bookmark, a waiting room dissolved into an office filled with cubicles. A modest brick hotel had just appeared when I slipped it between two pages and was—well, I guess this is where the story begins.
I was hurled into a blur—except that a blur takes at least a second and in less than that I was flying through a brass revolving door. It whispered behind me as I skidded into a room, tripped on a frayed carpet, and catapulted into the back of a chair upholstered in brocade and dust.
A shriek curled into the air, followed by a paperback, one sailing—or so it seemed to me—slightly higher than the other.
“Sorry!” I said to the woman in the chair as I bent down to retrieve the book. I gawked at the cover: Death and the Uphill Gardener.
She relaxed her grip on the padded arms and shook blood back into her fingers.
“You gave me a start, young man,” she said as she tugged the paperback from my fingers.
“But that book,” I began. I looked around. I was in a hotel lobby.
She adjusted her rhinestone-studded glasses. I stammered another apology, but she had already started reading and raised her hand to quiet me.
“Sorry,” I said again.
She turned a page. I looked around. Definitely a hotel lobby.
She uttered a sigh of contentment.
My parents’ books always end with good winning over evil.
“Excellent,” she said. “Excellent.” She closed the cover. I heard an explosion, let out a yelp, and felt a backfiring suck of air.
Something damp was soaking through the seat of my jeans.
I arched my back for leverage off the wet grass as the Elder Cousin extended a hand.
“Come,” he said.
I stumbled after him on the second weird trip of the morning. Or the third. Or the fourth. I was too confused to count. I followed him through the kitchen and into the living room where all the chairs were upholstered except for a single wooden one. He pointed toward it with his cane.
“Until your pants dry a bit,” he said.
I looked around the familiar room. Knickknacks and souvenirs crowded each other on every flat surface: the coffee table, two glass-fronted display stands, three ornate corner shelves, and a two-drawer filing cabinet draped with an Indian paisley shawl. I relaxed a little as I realized that everything was the way it always had been. A place for everything, I said to myself. A tin drum balanced beside two porcelain teapots shaped like cottages. Had they always had puffs of smoke coming out of their chimneys? There were artificial ferns with real blossoms.
Ferns have spores, not blossoms, I said to myself.
I sensed the Elder Cousin studying me. His normally blue eyes were sharkskin gray.
“I feel fine,” I said. “Honest.”
Fine, but a little wilted.
“You’re certain, Booker?”
I nodded.
“Let me make you a cup of hot chocolate,” he said. “Just in case.”
A bowl of buttons sat beside a bowl of polished stones. There’s nothing unusual about buttons, I thought, and then they shifted as a current rumbled through them.
He returned in a few minutes and handed me a mug. “You may be wondering,” he said, and, of course, I was, as he slipped his cane over the arm of his chair and sat down, “just what happened to you.”
I held the mug with two hands and sent a cloud of ordinary steam across the surface.
“Books are pretty much just books,” he began.
“Of course they are,” I said. Who had said anything about books?
“And bookmarks are bookmarks,” he continued. “Books take you places.”
He was starting to sound like the school librarian. “I know,” I said. I was feeling a little wobbly. “We had a display at school.”
“And so can bookmarks. Let me put it this way.” He leaned forward. “Once when you asked to accompany your parents when they were researching one of their novels—”
“Death and the Delicate Arch,” I interrupted. “I wanted to visit a desert.”
“What an absurd title!” Mrs. Bainbridge had strolled in like a piece of furniture too large for the room. “Sounds like a bad pair of shoes.”
“Maud, please,” he said. “I’m trying to explain.”
She wedged herself into a chair.
And then he started over, but I was so confused by what had been happening that I didn’t hear half of it until the words “the bookmark” and I looked at my pocket.
“But I left it in the book.”
“Where it did its job,” he said, “and came back.”
I removed it and felt again how thick the paper was.
“It’s very old,” Mrs. Bainbridge said when she saw me turning it this way and that. “Made from a most unusual paper. We think it was cut from the page of a book.”
The Elder Cousin put out his hand. “May I see it?”
I watched how intently he studied it.
“Any change, Allen?”
“None,” he said to her. “None that I can see.”
“Have you told him where it came from?”
“Not yet, Maud,” he said.
“Or how you got it?”
He shook his head. “Now is not the time.”
“It came from Siberia,” she said.
“Years ago,” he sighed, “when I was in the used book business, I took a consignment from a woman whose aunt and uncle had been in the Russian Far East. This particular collection came from Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. It’s not really Siberia.”
Mrs. Bainbridge shrugged. “But close enough.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “the bookmark was among a few papers tucked into one of the books. I had a dickens of a time getting them translated. They were part of a travel log. A voyage into the North Pacific Ocean. They provided clues about using the bookmark.”
“And the Russian words on the bookmark itself?” I asked.
“That I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody has been able to translate them.”
“Old, old language,” she said.
“All of which I can explain later,” he said, “but the important thing now is that you understand what the bookmark does.”
I was beginning to suspect.
“It starts with a book. The scenes on the bookmark show places where the book that you’re holding is being read.”
He tilted the bookmark so I saw a series of images drift across its surface.
“When the bookmark is slipped into the book, that’s where you go.”
“Where?” It seemed a little arbitrary.
“Where the book is being read.”
“And does the book go, too?”
“No. Readers have their own copies.”
“It doesn’t work for everybody,” Mrs. Bainbridge said. “For most people, it’s just a bookmark.”
“How do you know all of this?”
Instead of answering me, the Elder Cousin said, “Not everyone who can use it wants to.” He looked at Mr
s. Bainbridge. “Maud, for example,” and he smiled at her, “is quite content to remain here.”
Mrs. Bainbridge didn’t look like somebody who avoided adventure. With her cropped hair and sturdy body, she reminded me of a painting by Picasso that Mrs. Sweets in art showed us of a famous woman author glowering in a chair. “It is not a matter of bravado,” he continued as though reading my mind although I had to think twice about what “bravado” meant.
“Not that I haven’t traveled! Not that I won’t travel again!” she said and laughed.
“Do you recall where you placed the bookmark?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Near the end, I think,” she said softly.
“At almost the last page, if I’m not mistaken,” the Elder Cousin said. “Once the reader finishes the book and closes the cover, home we go, like it or not.”
“The first trips can be a bit disorienting,” Mrs. Bainbridge said.
Smokestacks and rumbling buttons, I thought.
“And if I want to get back before the book is finished?”
What I really wanted to ask was, “Why me?”
“You’ve a number of things to learn,” the Elder Cousin said. He took a wooden box off a shelf, removed the lid, and placed the bookmark inside.
“And it’s important that you do. But first—” and his eyes blinked rapidly as he stared into the distance and sat perfectly still. I thought he had heard something outside the window. A moment later he shook himself and asked, “Would you like more hot chocolate?”
“Some for me and more for him, Allen,” said Mrs. Bainbridge.
The Elder Cousin took my mug and said, “We suspected you were like us.”
Crap, crap, crap, I thought.
“What Allen means,” Mrs. Bainbridge said, “is that we think you might be in danger.”
She leaned a little closer.
“Lots to learn, Booker. Lots and lots. Tables of Continuance, Ratchet-backed Endnotes, the Silk Road, and, my favorite, Disambiguation.”
Then she raised her hand in half a salute and half a toast.
“To new and startling days!” she boomed.
I didn’t like the sound of that at all.
There’s something to be said about a place for everything and everything in its place. For order and predictability. For staying away from bears. Every afternoon of the next week, I got bookmark lessons from the Elder Cousin. How to freeze the image of the place where we wanted to go. (He simply covered the image with his thumb.) How to travel together. (I merely held onto his arm or sleeve.) How to get back. (I just put the bookmark upside down back into the book. If I didn’t have the book, I put it upside down in my pocket.) It was simple, but it all took practice. He kept the bookmark in the box when we weren’t using it. One afternoon he went into the kitchen for a glass of water. I knew where he kept the box. I wasn’t going to actually use the bookmark. I just wanted to hold it. It felt, well, it felt right. The speed with which he gripped my wrist amazed me.
“The bookmark is yours, Booker,” he said and let go of my wrist. “You’ll find it’s yours maybe more than you expect.”
I just looked at him.
“You won’t be able to get rid of it,” he said
“Why would I want to?”
“No reason,” he said. “No real reason. You’ll grow into using it gradually.”
My parents. I should explain that I didn’t tell them anything. Mrs. Bainbridge said we should keep this among the three of us. At least for now.
“Things would just get complicated,” she said.
I had never kept a secret of this size from them. It felt good.
The Elder Cousin and I spent a night in Bulgaria. We were in the mountains where there were bears. I was certain there were bears. Something brushed against the tent, and I wondered if my parents would work my disappearance into a book. Eaten by Bears in Bulgaria.
“Will my parents notice that I’m missing?”
“I would hope so, Booker.”
“I mean,” I said, “how does time work?”
“No,” he answered. “In that sense, you won’t be missed. Good books never age, and even these”—he nodded at Death and the Uphill Gardener—“age slowly.”
I was not eaten by bears, obviously. I soon knew the bookmark basics. Coming and going. Nothing complicated about it.
Back from Bulgaria, I sat at the kitchen table waiting for the Elder Cousin while Mrs. Bainbridge attacked a carrot with a vegetable peeler. After supper I was going to get introduced to what he called A Little Bit Onward. We were still using Death and the UHG.
I was sitting at the table. “You said I might be in danger.”
“I suppose I did,” she said and started on another carrot.
“Well?” I asked when it seemed like she wasn’t going to explain.
“I get carried away, Booker. The truth is, we thought we were done with it. That we’d put the bookmark away for good, buried it in a shed full of papers.”
“Why didn’t you just destroy it—burn it or tear it up?”
“Can’t. We tried. So we did the next best thing.”
“And then I found it after the shed exploded.”
“Yes.” It was clear she wasn’t going to explain how or why that had happened.
“Only I didn’t exactly find it. I caught it when the crow dropped it.”
“So the crow must have found it,” she said. “That seems right.”
She began slicing the carrots into thin disks.
“Allen had the bookmark for years before he fully discovered its traveling capabilities,” she said. “By accident. Like you. After that, my personal opinion is that he used it too frequently. He’ll say otherwise. But things started to happen.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said.
She gave me a look. Like she was humoring me.
“One day he used the bookmark in that original volume where he had found it, the book from Siberia. For two and a half days he couldn’t get back.”
I was puzzled. “I thought he said that time doesn’t pass when you’re using the bookmark.”
“It doesn’t. Usually.” She scooped the carrot chunks into a bowl and covered them with water. “But he had slipped out of time. When he got back, well, that’s when your mother found him and when I came along.”
“Where had he been?”
She didn’t answer right away. She started peeling a short crooked ginger root. Sweetness, like a toy sword, jabbed at the air.
“I don’t think he actually knew. That old book probably hadn’t been read for centuries, not really read. Wherever he ended up, it wasn’t Kansas.”
I knew what she meant. Sort of.
“Had he traveled back in time?”
“Maybe into it. Or through it.” She had a habit of not answering my questions. She said, “He insisted it was nothing.”
She grated the ginger into a small bowl.
“For a couple of years after that, Booker, we traveled together.” She put the ginger aside, slipped a dollop of butter into a saucepan and put it on the stove over a low burner. As it melted, she drizzled a tablespoon of honey into it.
“The danger isn’t,” she said, “that something is after you. It’s that you might do something dangerous yourself.”
“Unlikely,” I said. “Very slim chance of that.”
She again looked at me like she knew something I didn’t. She stirred the ginger into the honey and butter mixture. An invisible cloud of fragrance filled the kitchen. She drained the carrots, added them to the saucepan, and put on a lid.
“The bookmark will sometimes find the book,” she said. “Sort of like the way it found you.”
I went into the living room and picked up the wooden box. The Elder Cousin wasn’t so touchy about me handling the bookmark after I’d taken two short solo trips. I’d proved myself able to handle it. Even though they kept it and understood it more than I did, it belonged to me, like the Elder Cousin had said. Wh
en I held it, it was like I was in serious control. It felt good. It also felt goofy. The giant lions of the New York Public Library drifted past, followed by a blue heron lifting off a gray lake. The gold and glass interior of an elevator sped upward. People seemed to be reading the book everywhere.
My parents must be rich, I thought. I should ask for a bigger allowance.
A fishing boat was tied to a dock. At least I thought it was a fishing boat. There was a cabin near the front. At the back—the aft? the stern?—anyway, behind the cabin there was a mast without a sail. I saw a covered hatch and a tangle of cables and nets. Behind the ship, on the land, there were hills as bright green as emeralds. They glowed in the sun. They rose up, higher and higher, until a rocky peak jutted out at the top. It towered above everything.
“Ireland,” I said and froze the image.
The Irish had been the first to measure wind with the Beaufort scale. They had invented shorthand and tattoos. Or, at least, a tattoo machine. I didn’t have a tattoo. And shamrocks, I thought. Lucky shamrocks. One for me and one to surprise Mom with. How long would it take? By the time I get back, I’ll still be waiting—if I understood what the Elder Cousin had said about time.
I slipped the bookmark into the first chapter. The floor lurched sideways. I braced my feet against what felt like hard rubber on the deck. I gulped some sharp salty air.
“Whoa,” I said as the ship rocked gently and another boat glided past. My knees started to detach themselves from my legs, but I steadied myself by touching the side of the cabin.
The bright sky grew a little fuzzy as the sun went behind a cloud. Actually, the whole sky was overcast with just a little gap that allowed the sunlight to turn the hills so green. They were still green, but not that electric green. A breeze spread the pungent odor of fish, salt, chemicals, and work being done. I walked along the side of the cabin until I looked out over the back deck. Clumps of machinery of one kind or another had been pushed to one side. I stepped around the corner and looked into a room. There was a table covered with green rubber netting and bordered with a narrow raised lip. Death and the Uphill Gardener was sitting on it. I stepped inside. Next to the book was an open tinfoil wrapper with a few wrinkled pastries that looked like maple bars without the maple frosting. The room was really just a small kitchen. Nice and compact. And orderly. The way I liked things. I think I said that before. Varnished wood glowed on the walls. Even though I had put the bookmark at the front of the book, I didn’t want somebody coming and reading the last page and sending me back before I had picked a couple of shamrocks, so I dropped it into my backpack and went onto the deck to see how to get off the boat.