The Library Machine (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie)

by Dave Butler

  The undergravine’s eyes narrowed. “There is a de Minimis yet on the throne in Underthames.”

  “My cousin Elisabel.” Gnat gritted her teeth, not mentioning that Elisabel had stolen Gnat’s throne and murdered Gnat’s mother. “How are you apprised of the affairs of Underthames?”

  “Her emissary is here. She invites me to enter into the league with Underthames and its unexpected allies.”

  “Unexpected allies?” Gnat asked. “D’you mean rats?”

  “Don’t trust her!” Charlie blurted out.

  Undergravine Juliet looked down at Charlie and frowned. “You have poor manners.”

  “Aye, Charlie sometimes has little sense of decorum.” Gnat chuckled. “But he has a mighty heart.”

  “His mighty heart may get him skewered.” The undergravine tossed her hair. From someone else the gesture might have seemed petulant; from her, it was terrifying.

  Rachel Rosenbaum stepped forward, distancing herself slightly from Charlie’s other friends. “My mother taught me that this road was a peaceful road. A road for friends and allies.”

  “The rabbi’s daughter.” Juliet flared her nostrils and gazed at the girl for a few moments, and then drifted downward toward the floor. “Your mother was right, of course.”

  “I didn’t know I had come to Her Ladyship’s attention.” Rachel curtsied.

  “Everything in Hesse comes to my attention.” The undergravine turned her attention back to Gnat and Charlie. “You’ve not come here with the Prussian?”

  “We’re here on our own.” Gnat drifted down, again assuming an elevation only slightly lower than the undergravine’s.

  Juliet pressed on. “And you’re also not here with the Anti-Human League?”

  “The Anti-Human League?” Charlie yelped.

  Ollie laughed out loud. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. There’s no such thing as the Anti-Human League…Your Ladyship.”

  “Right.” Bob chuckled too. “That was just a pickled ’erring.”

  “Red herring, Bob.” Ollie sounded hesitant.

  “ ’Errings are always pickled.” Bob’s expression was grumpy. “Wouldn’t want to eat an ’erring that wasn’t, would you?”

  The undergravine studied the faces of Charlie and his friends. “There is more here than you are telling me.”

  Ollie shook his head. “It’s complicated.”

  Gnat threw back her shoulders and drifted slightly upward, putting herself at the undergravine’s level. “My cousin Elisabel de Minimis is a murderess.”

  “These are strong words.” The undergravine arched an eyebrow at Gnat. “Can you stand the trial of words such as these?”

  “Aye. In time, I aim to do precisely that.”

  Charlie couldn’t help himself, and butted into the conversation again. “The Anti-Human League wasn’t real. It was a red herring, as Bob says, to cover up the plots of the Iron Cog.”

  The undergravine narrowed her eyes. “I have heard this name, but not in recent years. The landgrave drove them from this city once. The present landgrave’s father.”

  “They’re scoundrels.” Bob grimaced.

  “The Iron Cog made me.” Charlie shrugged. “Or they made some of me. But I think some part was made by my father. The Iron Cog wanted to use me, and other”—he hated to say the word—“machines like me to take over England.”

  “Only you refused.” The undergravine drifted closer to Charlie.

  Charlie nodded. “And they killed my father.”

  “So you’re going to kill them.”

  Charlie took a step back. “No, I…I don’t want to kill anybody.” Was that true? Didn’t he, in fact, want to kill Heinrich Zahnkrieger? Or the Frenchman, Gaston St. Jacques? They certainly were willing to kill Charlie and his friends. But no, he didn’t want them to die. He just wanted them to go away. He wanted to stop them. Maybe he had been built to want to stop them, like Thomas had. “I don’t want to kill anybody. But I want to defeat them.”

  The undergravine nodded. “The Prussian brought machine men. Soldiers made of metal.”

  “Not me,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m no soldier.”

  “The pixie who told me these things was gravely injured by these same machine fighters. She lingers in her bed, and may yet die.”

  Charlie bowed his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  The undergravine took a deep breath. As she exhaled, she shuddered. “The Anti-Human League has offered me an alliance against the machine soldiers. I am inclined to take any ally I can find in such a conflict.”

  “Wait, no!” Charlie cried. “It’s a trick!”

  “What sort of trick, Charlie Pondicherry? My daughter was gravely wounded by a metal man. Now you, also a metal man…what trick would you warn me of?”

  Daughter? The pixie who might die was the undergravine’s daughter.

  “The Anti-Human League was invented by the Iron Cog!” There were too many dots for Charlie to connect them all in a coherent picture on such short notice. “I know that if your daughter is injured, you must have very strong feelings right now….I’m not sure how or why, but I think you’re being misled.”

  “There is no trick.” The green-winged fairy fluttered forward from the ranks, and suddenly Charlie recognized him. He wore a garment Charlie had never seen on a pixie: a long green tabard like knights in storybooks might wear, marked on the chest with a seal that showed two pixies holding between them a white shield quartered by a red cross. Beneath the shield was a scroll bearing the Latin words SICUT NOSTRAE MATRES ANTE, which the Babel Card rearranged for Charlie as LIKE OUR MOTHERS BEFORE. Charlie had met this fairy on entering Underthames, the fairy realm beneath Whitechapel. Then, the pixie had been a guard at the gate with a spear in his hands, but now he held a plain white staff.

  “Cousin Hezekiah!” Gnat cried in surprise.

  “There is an Anti-Human League,” Hezekiah said. “We elder folk are banding together to defend ourselves against human aggressors. The Prussians are attacking here, and the Crown is oppressing us in Britain, others elsewhere.”

  “Wait,” Charlie said. “What’s happening in Britain?”

  “Parliament is persecuting our kind,” Hezekiah said. “New laws, trials, and secret committees.”

  “That ain’t right,” Ollie grunted.

  “ ’Tisn’t,” Juliet agreed. “That is why we elder folk are resisting…together with other allies.”

  Ollie spat on the tunnel floor. “Rats.”

  “An’ I reckon that makes old ’Ezekiah ’ere the pied piper,” Bob added. “ ’E ain’t come to save your children, Your Ladyship; ’e’s come to lead ’em away.”

  Charlie recognized Bob’s reference to one of the stories by the Grimm brothers, and something about it bothered him. No, something about the brothers themselves. Or, more properly, something about Wilhelm.

  He dug into his pocket and found two strips of paper spat out by the mechanical catalog. One said:

  Wilhelm Grimm

  Bibliothekmaschine

  7:1:7:7

  And the other read:

  Shinto Legends of Japan

  M. Musashi

  7:2:103:14

  And suddenly, Charlie knew.

  “I have to go,” Charlie said. Then he turned and ran back the way he’d come, toward the library. The pixie warriors seemed surprised, but they looked to the undergravine and then let him pass.

  Charlie was so preoccupied with his sudden insight that he didn’t notice who had followed until he got to the secret door. Thomas was behind him, with Ollie wrapped around his neck like a scarf.

  “The others?” Charlie asked.

  Bamf! Ollie dropped to the ground in his boy form. He stared at the floor. “They stayed to talk to the pixies.”

  “You look sad.” Charlie
hesitated. “Did you want to stay to talk with the pixies too?”

  Ollie shook his head. “Bob’s mad at me.”

  Charlie tried to imagine reasons Bob could be mad at Ollie and couldn’t think of one. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Ollie shook his head. “Nothing to talk about, mate. I made a…serious mistake, is all.”

  “What are we doing back here?” Thomas asked.

  Charlie grinned. “I think I’ve found the Library Machine.”

  “Ain’t you worried about the monster?” Ollie asked.

  “I don’t think it would have stuck around,” Charlie said. “It’s probably gone back to its masters, to St. Jacques. But just in case…the three of us need to stay together.”

  They peered through every peephole they could find into the library and listened for the sound of any creature or researcher on the other side before dragging down the pulley to open the secret door.

  Charlie crept to the banister to survey the interior of the library. Eyes sweeping in a spiral about the empty central space, he looked for any sign of the monster. He also looked for signs of the machine men the undergravine had talked about. Nothing. Just students, going about library-type business, though some looked about nervously, as if they’d heard there had been a disturbance and worried it might be repeated.

  “So what’s your idea?” Thomas asked, crouching beside Charlie.

  “We need to get to level seven,” Charlie said. “Seven-one-seven-seven.”

  From their secret entrance it was a short stroll.

  “Here it is.” Charlie counted. They stood in a shadowed recess, shielded from the view of most of the library, although a person passing by on the ramp would have seen them. “Seventh floor, first section—it has to be first and not seventh because there are only four sections per floor—seventh shelf, seventh book. And, because there are twelve floors, the line between the sixth and seventh floors is the exact middle spot of the library.”

  The three boys stopped and stared.

  “There’s no book there,” Thomas said.

  “There must be some mistake.” Charlie consulted his slip of paper, 7:1:7:7. No mistake. Could someone have gotten here ahead of him and taken the book he wanted?

  Could it have been the shape-changer? But what would the monster want with the book?

  “What are the other books on the shelf?” The shelf was a little over the boys’ heads, so Thomas stood on tiptoe to look.

  Charlie imitated his brother. “The Mahabharata. The Ramayana. The Cloud of Unknowing. The Gospel of John. The Walam Olum. The Voluspa. The I Ching.”

  “What kind of library shelf is this?” Ollie asked. “These books seem random.”

  Charlie took one of the books off the shelf and looked at it more closely. “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.” He opened the front cover and looked at the flyleaf, hoping a tiny hope that maybe the books had been shelved out of order and he could find the book he was looking for, in another book’s assigned position. “Oh.”

  Written inside the book was its proper shelf position, 7:1:7:2. Also inside the front cover was pasted a bookplate. It read EX LIBRIS in large capital letters, which the Babel Card quickly rearranged into FROM THE BOOKS OF.

  And in the center of the bookplate, in a neat Continental hand, was written the name Wilhelm Grimm.

  Thomas looked over Charlie’s shoulder. “That’s strange.”

  “Maybe it’s sort of a clue.” Charlie put the Meditations back. “Let’s check the other books.”

  They looked, and found a bookplate with the name Wilhelm Grimm inside every book on the shelf.

  “These are Wilhelm Grimm’s personal books,” Charlie said. “His library. People give their collections to libraries sometimes when they die; he must have done that.”

  “But the book you want is missing,” Thomas said. “What book is it, anyway? A manual on how the Library Machine works? A history of it?”

  Charlie didn’t know. “Maybe it got pushed back. Give me a hand?”

  Thomas made stirrups with his hands and Charlie stepped into them. Thomas hoisted Charlie without effort. Charlie peered into the gap between the books, hoping to see the spine of the missing book, inadvertently shoved into the darkness by some overzealous librarian.

  Instead, flat on the shelf, he saw a button.

  It was hard to spot, because it was flat, but the shelves were dark-grained wood and the button was unmistakably a copper metallic color. Charlie pressed the button.

  “What’s going on?” Ollie asked.

  Charlie listened for the sound of machinery and heard none. “I guess nothing is happening. Go ahead and let me down.”

  Thomas relaxed and Charlie stepped to the floor. Turning to face the other boys, he was astonished to find that they were not alone.

  Standing behind Thomas and Ollie was a man. Or, rather, there stood the image of a man, but the image was composed of something that was neither light nor smoke but was instead both. He was a thin man, elderly, and bald. He smiled in a kindly way and stooped forward with a slouch that suggested he was really just a big boy who looked like an old man, and he was about to share a secret.

  Removing a long-stemmed smoking pipe from his mouth, the apparition smiled. “Hello.” The voice sounded as if it were far away, or as if a wind were whipping at the words and making them hard to hear. “My name is Wilhelm Grimm.”

  “You can’t be!” Charlie blurted out.

  “I can’t?” The apparition sucked at his pipe and held the smoke in his mouth, seeming to taste it. When he exhaled, the smoke left his mouth in a perfect, tiny ring. Rising, the ring expanded, and through it Charlie saw not the apparition claiming to be Wilhelm Grimm, nor the library in which they both stood, but countryside. Strangely, the countryside seemed to be constantly changing: one minute it was forest, and the next it was ocean, and then again it was a volcano. “Why can’t I?”

  “You’re dead,” Charlie pointed out. The apparition and Charlie both spoke English. The ghost’s English had a pleasant accent with mild and educated tones.

  The apparition looked down at the elbows of his tweed jacket, patched with dark fabric. “I don’t feel dead. Do I seem dead?”

  “Sort of.” Charlie looked to Thomas for help, but Thomas was crouched beside him, his eyes darting in all directions. It made him look like a smaller version of Lloyd, and Charlie tried not to laugh.

  The apparition harrumphed.

  Charlie tried a different approach. “Just because you look alive doesn’t mean you really are. That could be art, an illusion.”

  “Really?” The apparition blew another smoke ring. Charlie would have sworn he saw green grass and blue sky through the ring’s center. “Couldn’t I say the same about you?”

  Charlie hesitated. What did the apparition know? Of course, to phrase the question that way conceded the argument to the apparition that it was alive. But someone knew something. He chose his words carefully. “I suppose you could say the same about any person.”

  “You could indeed, Charlie.” The phantom’s smile only made Charlie feel uneasy. “But I didn’t say I was alive, did I? I said I didn’t think I was dead.”

  “How do you know my name?” Charlie’s voice sounded tiny in his own ears.

  “Of course, in the way we think of these things, it’s hard to imagine what it could possibly mean to be neither alive nor dead. What are the alternatives, eh, my boy?”

  Charlie felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  “I was once alive. And you…well, I suppose this is what you’ve come here to find out.”

  “Are you the Library Machine?” Charlie asked.

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” the phantom said. “Are you?”

  The question made Charlie acutely uncomfortable. “You didn’t tell me how you know my name.
That’s impolite.”

  The apparition that looked like Wilhelm Grimm shrugged. “Well, you didn’t introduce yourself, even after I did. Isn’t that rude?”

  “I’m Charlie Pondicherry, Mr. Grimm,” Charlie said. “This is my brother Thomas, and my friend Ollie.”

  “Hmm.” A smoke ring. “Please, call me Wilhelm. I am far too old to be Mister. Or call me Papa Wilhelm, if you feel you must give me a title. And you two, Charlie and Thomas, are different from the other boys, aren’t you?”

  Charlie nodded reluctantly. “How do you know that?”

  “You’ve been here before, Charlie. With your friends. I watched you.” Charlie must have made a disconcerted face, because Wilhelm Grimm laughed. “Oh, nothing sinister, I promise you.” He waved his pipe in a circular motion. “This particular spot is where I appear, when I am invited and I choose to come, but the library—all the library—is my home. I’m rooted here. Physically connected, don’t you know, so I see what happens here.”

  “And what makes you say I’m different?”

  Wilhelm Grimm blew a smoke ring so big, Charlie could see an entire village through it, and a flock of ducks swimming on a river. Was Wilhelm Grimm not an apparition after all? Was he alive somewhere and communicating remotely? But Charlie was sure the real Wilhelm Grimm and his brother Jacob had died twenty or thirty years earlier.

  Although he’d thought Isambard Kingdom Brunel was long dead too.

  “I can just see it in you,” Grimm finally said.

  “See what?” Charlie involuntarily clutched at the hole in his side. Maybe he should find another cream like his bap had once made him wear on his face.

  “Myself,” Papa Wilhelm explained. “I can see myself in you.”

  Thomas stood up straight.

  Charlie was puzzled. “What do you mean? Is this some long way of saying you can tell I like reading books, because you saw me in the library before? What do you mean? What is the Library Machine?”

  “Know this, Charlie Pondicherry.” Wilhelm Grimm chuckled. “You and I are kin. Ah!” He raised a finger, heading off Charlie’s objections. “It is true. We are kin because I live in this machine, this library. And we are kin because a part of me was stolen once. It was stolen by a person motivated by greed and ambition, but perhaps still something good has come of his act. That bit of me that was stolen passed through strange and dark hands, but it came to rest in you.”