“You’re only twelve and fourteen,” said Dorrie’s father, “and it just all sounds so…dangerous.”
“Oh, it is,” said Phillip. “Terribly, fantastically dangerous. Especially since particularly difficult times may lie ahead for the Lybrariad.”
Dorrie’s mother visibly gulped.
“On the bright side,’ said Phillip. “In four hundred years, the Lybrariad has only lost one apprentice, and that was entirely her fault because she insisted on doing foolish things with tungsten.”
Mistress Wu pushed the sheaf of papers across the tablet to Dorrie’s parents. “Here are some written materials about the apprenticeship program—do burn them when you’re done reading.” She folded her hands. “Now. We organize the year into quarters in Petrarch’s Library. The summer quarter begins on the first of July, in three days’ time. It would be sensible for Dorrie and Marcus to arrive a few days in advance, to prepare.
“We’ll get to stay with the other apprentices in the attics,” said Dorrie and realized immediately that she’d taken a wrong turn.
“Stay?” said her mother, newly alarmed, her teacup clattering against her saucer.
“Oh,” said Mistress Wu, looking with sudden great pity at Dorrie’s mother and father. “I’m sorry we didn’t make that fact clear. As apprentices, Dorrie and Marcus will indeed need to stay with us in Petrarch’s Library. There are practicums, you see, and—”
“For how long?” demanded Dorrie’s mother.
“Well, a quarter runs three months and—”
“Three months!” cried Dorrie’s father. He rounded on Marcus. “What about your friends here? What about that band you were going to start with that boy with that hoop in his eyebrow?”
“You can’t stand that kid!” said Marcus.
Her father swung back around to face Dorrie, looking shocked. “And what about the Passaic Academy of Swordplay and Stage Combat? I thought you loved being part of that.”
“I did,” said Dorrie, feeling her heart squeezing painfully on its own mixed feelings. “But that was all pretend. And this is real. I have the chance to really learn how to use a sword and do something that counts with it.”
“What about your sister—and us?” asked Dorrie’s mother, her voice choked. “I can’t not see my children for three months!”
“Yes, I imagine that would be simply wretched,” said Mistress Wu, her eyes looking filmy.
“Couldn’t they come home for a visit or two?” asked Dorrie’s mother.
“In future quarters, yes, that will be possible,” said Mistress Wu, blotting her eyes. “But this quarter, given the situation…”
Dorrie looked anxiously from her mother to her father, even as they were exchanging the same kind of look with each other. “Please,” she whispered.
Finally, Dorrie’s mother squeezed her husband’s hand and then turned back. “You can give this a try for one of these…quarters, and then we’ll see.”
“A try,” Dorrie’s father repeated firmly.
“And getting maimed or killed will simply not be tolerated,” added Dorrie’s mother, tears in the corners of her eyes. “That happens once, and we’re done.”
“Well, of course we’d be done,” Marcus said. “We’d be dead.”
Dorrie kicked him hard under the kitchen table as an abounding joy nearly lifted her out of her chair.
Chapter 3
An Inconspicuous Entry
Two days later, Dorrie and Marcus were walking quickly along Grand Avenue toward the Passaic Public on their way to begin their apprenticeships. Mistress Wu and Phillip had outlined the plan for Dorrie and Marcus’s return to Petrarch’s Library at the conclusion of their visit with the Barnes.
“Lybrarians-in-training Mr. Louis P. Kornberger and Ms. Amanda Ness will help get you into the staff room, of course,” Mistress Wu had said.
“They’ve been accepted?” Dorrie had cried joyfully. She’d worried the Lybrariad wouldn’t invite her favorite local librarians into the training program. Especially Mr. Kornberger, who, though Dorrie loved him, lacked perhaps the more obvious lybrarian warrior qualities.
“What if Scuggans gives us trouble?” Marcus had asked.
Mistress Wu had sifted through her papers. “Ah, yes. Mr. Richard P. Scuggans, director of the Passaic Public Library.” She had looked up. “According to Amanda, he’s taken a couple weeks off to recover from”—she had consulted her papers—“a personally traumatic recent event.”
Dorrie had snorted. “He can’t mean Mr. Gormly stealing his clothes.” The last time she had seen Mr. Scuggans, he’d been pelting past the Passaic Public Library’s magazine rack wearing nothing but a “Where Will a Book Take You Today” poster.
“That was way more traumatic for us,” Marcus had said.
Mistress Wu’s brows had risen as her eyes scanned the page further. “It seems Mr. Scuggans has officially banned you both from the library. For releasing a rodent onto the premises. Just as well he won’t be there when you arrive. The Lybrariad would appreciate an inconspicuous reentry, please.”
Now Dorrie glanced behind them again as she’d done regularly since they’d left the house.
“Can’t you use a mirror or listen for footsteps or something?” asked Marcus, hiking his backpack up higher on his shoulder. The neck of his ukulele stuck out of the top. “You’re appalling my inner stealth master. And if my outer stealth master was here, you’d be appalling him too.”
Dorrie laughed out loud at the thought of Master Casanova, the Lybrariad’s white-wigged stealth and deception master, walking beside them down the potholed street.
“And if Mr. Biggs does have friends looking for us,” continued Marcus, “you are totally skywriting our position.”
“I’m not worried about friends of Mr. Biggs,” said Dorrie, facing front again. “I’m worried Mom and Dad are going to catch up to us and tell us we can’t go after all.”
Marcus took a sharp right around a corner, departing from their usual route.
“Hey,” said Dorrie, stopping. “Where are you going?”
“Well, no sense taking the obvious route then.”
Grinning, Dorrie ran after him.
After some devious twisting and turning of Marcus’s design, the library came into view. Dorrie felt a bit of the lump in her throat returning from the night before when Miranda had insisted the whole family squeeze onto the couch to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. She’d refused to skip the “Cheer Up, Charlie” song and had wailed through it inconsolably until Menelik had promised to knit a coat for her invisible dog.
Thoughts of Ebba, her best friend among the apprentices, and Savi waiting for her somewhere in the tangle of Petrarch’s Library chased away the lump. Despite the boarded-up window on the second floor and the paint peeling off its door frames, Dorrie felt the Passaic Public Library looked beautiful and dignified, its red bricks glowing with late-afternoon light.
She and Marcus hurried up the steps. Joining a horde of preschoolers being coaxed along by a weary-looking woman, they pushed through the swinging glass door. A few steps in, Dorrie heard a voice that made her freeze.
“I’ve already explained the situation to you, Mrs. Jackson,” said Mr. Scuggans from behind the circulation desk. He was readjusting his toupee with the aid of a pocket mirror. “You cannot check a book out without a library card, and I cannot possibly issue you a library card without seven forms of identification, including a birth certificate.”
“But you know, all my possessions were lost when my apartment building burned down last week,” said an elderly bent woman. She held out a newspaper. “You can read about it yourself.”
Behind Dorrie, one of the preschooler’s lunchboxes clattered to the floor. Dorrie seized Marcus’s arm and yanked him behind a bookcase.
“No noise,” said Mr. Scuggans, sounding enra
ged. “At all.”
Dorrie cautiously peeked through a gap in the books and saw Mr. Scuggans glaring at the preschoolers, one eye twitching convulsively.
“Please,” the old woman said. “I’ve been taking out books here for fifty-three years.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Scuggans, going back to his pocket mirror and sounding nothing of the sort. “No exceptions.”
In the week since Dorrie had seen him, his real hair had developed a gray undercoat, giving his groundhog-colored toupee the look of a mismatched teapot lid.
Marcus elbowed her. “What’s he doing here?”
Mr. Scuggans promptly gave them an answer. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I am expecting the Mayor of Passaic and representatives of the local media any minute now.” He breathed on his watch and rubbed it on his shirtfront. “It may interest you to know I am receiving a special commendation for courage in the line of duty. Were you aware a dangerous criminal came through the library recently?”
“Yeah, and Mr. Scuggans ran around in circles screaming, ‘Help! Police!’” whispered Marcus. “How is that courageous?”
Dorrie looked across the tables and bookshelves to the spot where the staff room door beckoned. It was tantalizingly close, but getting to it from where they were would put them directly in Mr. Scuggans’s line of sight.
“And where are Mr. Kornberger and Amanda?” Marcus asked.
“Let’s sneak back out and go around to the back door,” said Dorrie. “We can come up the basement stairs and get to the staff room without him seeing us.”
Marcus nodded, and they crept back out the way they’d come in.
Around back, Marcus yanked on the gray metal door, but it was locked tight. “Now what?”
Dorrie stepped back. A window a ways down the wall and not too far above their heads was half-open.
A minute later, Dorrie was crouched against the brick wall, and Marcus used her as a human ladder. “Why exactly did I volunteer to be on the bottom?” she panted as his sneaker nearly took off her ear.
“Pride,” said Marcus. “It’s so easy to use against you.”
The window screeched as Marcus forced it farther up.
“Which room is it?” panted Dorrie.
“Bathroom.”
Marcus’s weight disappeared from her back. A moment later, she heard the sound of something metallic hitting something hard with great force and a great gushing. Marcus appeared in the window utterly soaked. “I may have broken a small piece of plumbing.”
Behind Dorrie came the sound of cars rolling into the graveled parking lot.
Dorrie whirled. A long, black car with little fluttery flags affixed to the hood was pulling in.
“I think,” Marcus said conversationally, “that the Mayor’s here.”
She tossed her pack to Marcus. “Give me your hand!”
He threw the pack behind him and had just reached down when the back door was flung open and Mr. Scuggans appeared. He and Dorrie stared at each other for a horrified silent instant.
“You!” cried Mr. Scuggans, his eyes wild, his voice saturated with loathing.
“Jump!” yelled Marcus.
Dorrie leaped as well and high as she ever had, just managing to grab hold of his hand, her toes scrabbling at the bricks.
“Help!” cried Mr. Scuggans, waving his arms at the people getting out of the cars. “Illegal ingress! Illegal egress! Trespass! Stop them!”
Behind her, Dorrie heard the sound of running feet. Marcus gave a mighty heave, and Dorrie managed to get her chest over the sill, but she felt Mr. Scuggans’s hands clamp around her ankle. He gave a yank, and she nearly fell, clawing at the sill. A brick came away in her hands and plummeted out of sight. Dorrie heard a thud accompanied by a shriek, and suddenly, her foot was free.
She tumbled through the window and onto the floor.
“That hoodlum threw a brick at me!” shouted Mr. Scuggans from outside.
“What’d you throw a brick at him for?” asked Marcus, dragging her to her feet.
“I didn’t,” Dorrie protested, not thinking it was the right time to go into details.
Slipping and splashing through the great puddle of water that now covered the floor, they streaked for the door and nearly collided with Amanda and Mr. Kornberger on the other side.
“By the bard’s beard!” said Mr. Kornberger, his curly hair wild. “Where have you been?”
“Where were you?” Dorrie hissed.
Amanda hurried them toward the staff room door, her hundred braids swinging. “When Mr. Scuggans showed up, he sent us to clean up the staff room for his interview. Mr. Kornberger slipped out to try to intercept you, but…”
Thundering steps on the stairway from the basement announced that Mr. Scuggans and the others were on their way up.
“Just tell him we got away through the front door!” said Dorrie.
Amanda hurriedly pushed Dorrie and Marcus into the staff room. “We’ll stall them as long as we can!”
Dorrie and Marcus sprinted for the janitor’s closet, slipped in, and closed the door behind them.
“I’m not sure that was entirely inconspicuous,” said Marcus, locking it.
“Francesco’s going to kill us,” Dorrie said, panting as she dug in her pocket for the little length of flat metal Phillip had given her to pry up the worn plank that hid the mechanism that opened the door. Crouching, she levered one end upward. The plank rose silently on a well-oiled hinge, revealing a small wheel in the cavity below. Left or right, Dorrie thought to herself, suddenly unsure.
“Button, button, who’s got the button?” said Marcus.
“Willy Wonka quotes not helpful,” hissed Dorrie, taking hold of the wheel.
“Well, c’mon, already!”
Dorrie chose left and gave the wheel a twist. The back wall of the closet swung away from them on one side, golden light burnishing the rags and paint cans.
Chapter 4
Among Friends, Mostly
Once inside the secret five-sided room Great-Aunt Alice’s father had made when he’d built the Passaic Public Library and in which the entrance to Petrarch’s Library lay, Dorrie slammed the door behind them.
“Hold!” rang out a pleasant, if tense, voice.
Dorrie spun around. In some ways, the room was just as it had been when she’d passed through last. The gas lamp still hissed softly from its ceiling fixture. The bookshelves still held their fantastic collection of books and things it was hard not to want to pick up. The gaping hole that connected the Passaic Public Library to Petrarch’s Library still glowed blue-white around its jagged edge in the center of the room.
On the other hand, a row of computers now sat on the heavy wooden table with its carved dragon legs. Dorrie instantly resented their modern glow. But there was no time to dwell on the change. Behind the computers stood five vibrantly alert lybrarians, all with their eyes on Dorrie and Marcus. Dorrie knew they were lybrarians because one held a throwing dagger, two held slingshots, and another a thick staff. They had all made attempts at twenty-first-century dressing. It hadn’t gone perfectly well. A grandmotherly-looking woman was wearing a tube top over a suit jacket.
“Weapons away,” said the fifth lybrarian in the same pleasant voice Dorrie had heard before. She was plump with a soft puff of a bun and friendly, if watchful, brown eyes.
The other four lybrarians secreted their weapons, seated themselves, and immediately began tapping at their keyboards with great focus.
“I’m Rachel Davis,” said the fifth as she slipped a pair of headphones down to rest around her neck. “Acting keyhand for twenty-first-century Passaic.” She gestured to the typing lybrarians. “We’ve been assigned the mission of finding Mr. Gormly and Petrarch’s Star. The Passaic apprentices, I presume?”
“Indeed,” said a deep voice off to one side, sounding di
stinctly unenthusiastic.
Dorrie jerked her head around to see a tall man with an eye patch and graying dark hair standing close to one of the bookcases. One of his hands rested on the pommel of a long sword. He held a fat stack of folders in the crook of his other arm.
“M-master Francesco…” Dorrie stammered. Her stomach quivered unpleasantly as it always did in the presence of the director of security for Petrarch’s Library. His craggy face looked as fierce and as thunderous as ever, and his thin, waxed mustache was still jet-black. She shot Marcus a quick look, wishing her clothes weren’t soaked and that she wasn’t panting.
“Well,” said Lybrarian Davis. “A pleasure to meet you.”
Dorrie wasn’t at all sure Francesco shared her feeling. During Dorrie’s time in Petrarch’s Library, Master Francesco had looked upon her with the utmost suspicion, expressing more than once his belief that if she wasn’t out to harm Petrarch’s Library, she wasn’t there out of a love for the Lybrariad’s mission either. Only his daughter, Millie, had seemed to think less of Dorrie.
He seemed about to speak when, from one of the back corners of the room, angry chittering sounded. In a large cage, Moe the mongoose began to hurl his long, glossy brown body from side to side. He paused for a moment to bare his teeth.
“There’s the keyhand we all know and love,” crowed Marcus.
Francesco looked pained.
Even though Dorrie knew she pretty much owed her life to Moe, she still had a hard time seeing the charms in him that Ebba did. She glanced at the hole in the floor, remembering how Mr. Gormly had hurled Moe into the Roman bath far below after Moe attacked him.
“An apprentice named Ebba has been in here five times already today,” said Lybrarian Davis, returning to her computer. “Her most updated message is that the apprentices are waiting for you in the attics and that you should come quickly because Sven will be reading out celebratory refreshments.”
“Oh! Thank you!” said Dorrie, feeling a surge of intense pleasure.
She and Marcus tore for the jagged hole. Sven was the acknowledged champion of conjuring sweet, delicious things out of books.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 3